從眾效果對負面口碑意圖的影響

Abstract

隨著部落格的快速發展，越來越多的廣告商投入預算進行病毒式行銷(viral marketing)，廠商提供知名部落客試用品或是體驗機會，然後部落客再據此撰寫產品/服務心得。這個現象使得部落格文章作為一個電子口碑的公平公正性漸漸受到質疑，這些幾乎像是廣告的正面資訊，很容易導致負面失驗，而使得不滿意的消費者去散播負面口碑。本篇研究的主要目的，是檢驗在不同的口碑內容(contents)和不同的口碑背景(context)之下，使否會發生從眾效果，而影響消費者進行負面口碑的意圖。第一部分的結果指出，即使商品/服務的表現不如預期，透過在口碑內容中提到這些產品/服務已經建立的名聲，將可以減少消費者製造負面口碑的傾向。根據第二部分，部落格的人氣越高，主要決定負面口碑傾向的因素可能是期望負面失驗效果，從眾效果在這些情境中不顯著，而文章回覆的相關性對消費者負面口碑的傾向則沒有顯著影響。

With the rapid development of the weblog, increasing numbers of companies are interested in spending their advertising budgets on blogs. Companies provide famous bloggers chances to try out products/services, and then the bloggers post their evaluations about the products/services. This phenomenon makes consumers question the blog article’s fairness and impartiality as an electronic word-of-mouth. This mostly positive advertisement-like information can easily lead to negative disconfirmation, and so dissatisfied consumers tend to spread negative word-of-mouth. The main purpose of this research is to test whether the difference of the eWOM contents and context will induce conformity effect, and therefore, affect consumers’ negative WOM intention. Results of the study1 indicated that the emerged value could be used as a buffer to diminish unfavorable consumer responses resulting from negative experiences. Study 2 suggested that when actual experience is worse than anticipated, readers of the popular blog will have more intentions to engage in negative WOM than those who get information from a less famous blog, regardless of the reply relevance.