Consumers are increasingly sharing their opinions on societal issues and products online. We studied the implications of such online word-of-mouth for consumer judgement and decision-making. The case used is organic food, which is the most successful among the currently emerging, sustainability-differentiated food product categories. We first analysed the online discussion on organic food by conducting a text-mining study of reader comments (N = 63,379) from the comments section of a major German online news outlet. Topics therein are discussed with differing frequency, thereby indicating the salience of the various issues to online readers and consumers. One organic food topic of high salience (animal welfare) and one of low salience (biodiversity) were selected to investigate the behavioural relevance of salient online topics in a subsequent priming experiment (online survey of German consumers; N = 1,118). In particular, we tested whether the relative online salience of the two topics used as primes influenced the likelihood of choosing organic instead of conventional eggs and milk in a choice experiment and the acceptance of policies supporting organic farming. Although ineffective for the choice of milk, the priming worked as hypothesized regarding the choice of eggs and policy acceptance. Priming the topic with high online salience is more effective at promoting pro-organic behaviour than priming the topic with low online salience. Priming effects also depended on prime strength, attitude strength and experience with buying organic food. We discuss how insights from text mining of online word-of-mouth can be employed to promote sustainable consumption behaviour.

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在线聊天对消费者行为重要吗？有机食品的启动实验

消费者越来越多地在网上分享他们对社会问题和产品的看法。我们研究了这种在线口碑对消费者判断和决策的影响。使用的案例是有机食品，它是目前新兴的、可持续性差异化的食品类别中最成功的。我们首先通过对读者评论（N= 63,379) 来自德国主要在线新闻媒体的评论部分。其中的主题以不同的频率进行讨论，从而向在线读者和消费者表明各种问题的重要性。在随后的启动实验（德国消费者在线调查；N= 1,118)。特别是，我们测试了作为素数的两个主题的相对在线显着性是否影响在选择实验中选择有机而不是传统鸡蛋和牛奶的可能性，以及对支持有机农业的政策的接受度。尽管对牛奶的选择无效，但启动作用与鸡蛋选择和政策接受度的假设一样。启动具有高在线显着性的主题比启动具有低在线显着性的主题更有效地促进亲有机行为。启动效应还取决于原始强度、态度强度和购买有机食品的经验。我们讨论了如何利用在线口碑文本挖掘的见解来促进可持续的消费行为。