Utilizing the platform economy effect through EWOM: Does the platform matter?☆
Graphical abstract
Introduction
With the emergence and rapid development of various platforms, firms nowadays are leveraging the effect of the platform economy, which can be defined as the set of economic and social activities facilitated by platforms (Farrell and Greig, 2016) to increase their sales and revenues. Platforms offer distribution channels and enable firms to reach consumers. These platforms usually offer a digital framework, enabling suppliers to post information regarding their products and services and allowing consumers to post reviews after their consumption experiences (Wan et al., 2019).
Online consumer reviews can generate an electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) effect that significantly affects consumer demand and business revenue and thus have been intensively examined in previous studies (e.g., Li et al., 2019, Yang and Dong, 2018). The advantages of the digital platforms mainly lie with their ability to cover a wide range of consumer markets and reach consumers easily (Gong et al., 2019). Thus, using the platform economy effect through positive eWOM can boost firms' image and reputation, increasing consumer demand rapidly. However, the first step to using the platform economy through eWOM is understanding the properties of the platform. Due to the different social and technical properties of the platforms (e.g., social media, third-party booking, or direct sales platforms), the platform itself can also play an important role in influencing consumers' reviews and perceptions (Xiang et al., 2017). Understanding how generated online reviews and managerial responses from various platforms differ can give firms better knowledge of consumers’ perceptions as reflected by their reviews, thus guiding the eWOM behavior and stimulating a positive effect, depending on the particular platform.
Realizing the business value of online consumer reviews, many businesses put effort into interacting with and responding to consumer reviews, which are proven to recover service failure, enhance consumer loyalty, and generate future consumer purchase behavior (Gu and Ye, 2014). The research into managerial responses should not be separate from research dealing with consumer reviews. The optimal response strategy depends on the corresponding consumer reviews (Li et al., 2018). The responses should target particular reviews to address consumers' concerns and comments directly, instead of having a standardized and consistent response to all reviews (Lui et al., 2018). Thus, examining the interactions between managerial responses and online reviews is critical for guiding the managers to implement an optimal and targeted response to better understand and alleviate consumers’ concerns. This maintains efficient communications between consumers and managers to enhance consumer retention.
What consumers mention in their reviews may not fully reflect the determinants of their satisfaction. Consumer satisfaction reflects their perception during consumption, which is determined by the gap between expectation and the perceived quality of the consumption (Oliver, 1980). However, the psychological process of writing online reviews is different from the psychological process during the consumption (Xu, 2018). Online consumer reviews contain “noise” when fully reflecting consumer satisfaction because consumers have various motives for writing reviews rather than merely exhibiting their consumption perception (Xu, 2020). Therefore, understanding the separate psychological processes of writing reviews and determining degrees of satisfaction can help managers understand online reviews more fully. In this way, firms can enhance consumers’ post-consumption satisfaction or alleviate their post-consumption dissatisfaction by targeting the most important attributes. Therefore, in this study, we also analyze the reflection of online reviews on consumer satisfaction.
Based on the communication accommodation theory (Giles and Smith, 1979), we examine how consumers and managers tailor and attune their content and style of communications by adjusting the contents and linguistic features of their online reviews or managerial responses on different platforms. This study focuses on both the linguistic and content characteristics of online reviews and managerial responses by answering questions about what consumers (managers) write in their reviews (responses), namely, the contents and how consumers (managers) write their reviews (responses), namely, the linguistic characteristics. We examine the role of platforms in affecting the contents and linguistic characteristics of online consumer reviews and managerial responses and the reflection of consumer reviews on their satisfaction. In detail, we examine and compare online consumer reviews and managerial responses on various platforms in four dimensions: (1) linguistic characteristics, (2) review content, (3) the interaction between consumers and managers, and (4) the mechanism of the reflection of online reviews in consumer satisfaction. This focus has resulted in four overarching research questions. First, to examine the first dimension of linguistic characteristics of online reviews, we pose the first research question: How do the linguistic characteristics of online consumer reviews, in terms of subjectivity, diversity, readability, sentiment, and length of review, differ across various platforms? In addition, to analyze the second dimension of online review contents, we posit the second research question: How does the focus on attribution in online consumer reviews differ across various platforms? Moreover, to discuss the third dimension of the interaction between consumers and managers from online managerial responses, we propose the third research question: How does managers' online response behavior, or the degree to which managers' responses match consumer reviews, have different mechanisms across various platforms? Furthermore, to investigate the fourth dimension of the consumer satisfaction reflection mechanism from online reviews, we present the fourth research question: How does the mechanism of online consumer reviews’ reflection of satisfaction differ across various platforms?
The three types of platforms in a hospitality context examined in this study include social media platforms (i.e., TripAdvisor in this study), third-party booking platforms (i.e., Expedia in this study), and direct-sales online platforms (namely, firms’ own channels). We collected data for both online consumer reviews of hotels and managerial responses from these three platforms to analyze and answer the four research questions.
Previous studies of online consumer reviews and managerial responses have the following four limitations, which are addressed in this study as our contributions. First, regarding online consumer review studies, the majority has focused on either consumers’ descriptions or evaluations of perceived quality or performance in their reviews (e.g., Xiang et al., 2015, Xu and Li, 2016), namely, the content or emotion reflected in reviews. Thus, the first contribution of this study lies in the fact that it combines and extends the two fields of study by examining both the content and linguistic styles of online consumer reviews. We answer two important questions: what consumers write and how they write.
Second, most previous authors have focused on only online consumer reviews or managerial responses (e.g., Lui et al., 2018) without examining the connection between them. The few researchers discussing the connections (e.g., Chen et al., 2019) have focused on how managerial response influences consumers' future review behavior instead of the reverse—namely, how online consumer reviews affect managers' responses. Thus, the second contribution of this study is that we examine how consumer reviews affect the actions of the managers in responding: how consumers' different writing content and linguistic characteristics affect managers’ writing content and linguistic characteristics.
Third, most authors focusing on online consumer reviews and managerial responses have examined them on a single platform, with the majority focusing on either third-party booking website (e.g., Xiang et al., 2015) or social media (e.g., Valdivia et al., 2017). Consumers' reviews and managerial response behaviors on direct platforms have received little discussion, with even fewer studies, if any, offering examinations of consumers' reviewing behavior and managers' response behavior on different platforms. Thus, the third contribution of this study is to fill in this gap with empirical evidence from three different platforms, thus reflecting those different reviewing and response behaviors and indicating consumers' different motivations for writing online reviews along with managers’ different response strategies.
Last, most previous authors (e.g., Xiang et al., 2015, Xu and Li, 2016) have assumed the attributes mentioned in consumers' reviews to be a direct reflection of the determinants of their satisfaction. Another contribution of this study is that we differentiate between consumers’ online review writing process and their satisfaction generation process by examining whether all attributes mentioned in the reviews affect their satisfaction. Managers can then respond to their consumers in a more targeted way, focusing on the attributes that influence consumer satisfaction most. Fig. 1 shows the limitations of previous studies and the contributions of this study.
The rest of the study is organized as follows. Section 2 describes the theoretical background. Section 3 proposes the hypotheses. Section 4 describes the data collection and analytics. Sections 5 Results, 6 Discussion present and discuss the empirical results. Section 7 discusses the theoretical and managerial implications. Section 8 concludes the study and proposes future research directions.
Section snippets
Theoretical background
The theoretical background of this study lies in the communication accommodation theory (Giles and Smith, 1979). In essence, online consumer reviews and managerial responses are communications between consumers and their peer consumers and between consumers and managers (Chen et al., 2019). The communication accommodation theory describes the behavioral changes that people make to tailor and attune their communications to those of others (Giles, 2016). The basis of the communication
The linguistic characteristics of online consumer reviews
Consumers have different motivations for writing online reviews, including altruism, or helping future consumers make purchase decisions; psychological need, or a desire to reveal and express emotion; social needs, or the urge to use online reviews to engage with other consumers; and economic incentives, or interest in monetary benefit (Bronner and De Hoog, 2011). Consumers who write and post online reviews on different platforms (e.g., social media, third-party booking platforms, and direct
Data collection
We collected online consumer reviews about the well-known Marriot hotel chain from three platforms, namely Expedia, representing third-party booking platforms; TripAdvisor, representing social-media platforms; and Marriot's official booking platform, representing direct platforms (channels). We selected 24 Marriot hotels covering all five regions of the United States, including the West, Midwest, Northeast, Southwest, and Southeast, and collected the corresponding consumer reviews and hotel
Linguistic characteristics of online consumer reviews on various platforms
The linguistic characteristics of online consumer reviews on the three platforms can be found in Table 3.
Table 3 shows that the linguistic styles of online consumer reviews on the three platforms differ. Consumers’ reviews on social media have higher subjectivity, greater length, and lower polarity, diversity, and readability than those on the third-party and direct platforms.
Attributes mentioned in online consumer reviews on various platforms
For the online reviews from all three platforms, we used LSA to extract the text factors, yielding consistent results
The differences in the linguistic characteristics of online consumer reviews on various platforms
We examined five linguistic characteristics of online consumer reviews. The results in Table 3 support Hypothesis 1. For linguistic characteristics, online consumer reviews on social media platforms have the highest subjectivity and length and the lowest polarity, diversity, and readability; the online consumer reviews on direct platforms have the highest polarity, diversity and readability and the lowest subjectivity.
In detail, regarding subjectivity, we found that consumers are most willing
Theoretical implications
The theoretical foundation of this study is based on the communication accommodation theory (Giles and Smith, 1979). The findings support and extend this theory from the aspects that this study specifies communication in the form of online consumer reviews and managerial responses. We examined the mechanism of the communication accommodation in two forms—content and linguistic style—depending on the different platform. We found that platforms, as being virtual social networks and online
Conclusions
This study has examined both the linguistic characteristics and product and service attributes found in consumer reviews and in managers’ corresponding responses on three platforms: a social-media platform, third-party booking platform, and direct platform. Regarding the linguistic characteristics of online consumer reviews, we found that social media posts have the lowest polarity, readability, and diversity; and have the highest subjectivity and longest length. The direct platform posts have
Author contributions section
Xun Xu is mainly responsible for the theoretical sections and writes the major body of the paper. Chieh Lee is mainly responsible for data collection and analysis.
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