Asia pacific journal of information systems

The Korea Society of Management Information Systems (한국경영정보학회)
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Analyzing the Effect of Electronic Word of Mouth on Low Involvement Products

  • Youngeui Kim (Department of Social Network Science, Kyung Hee University) ;
  • Hyun Sil Moon (School of Management, Kyung Hee University) ;
  • Jae Kyeong Kim (School of Management, Kyung Hee University)
  • Received : 2017.05.19
  • Accepted : 2017.09.21
  • Published : 2017.09.30
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Abstract

As social media are increasingly being used as a marketing platform, electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) has also become popular in both research and business areas. However, although many studies have examined the effect of eWOM, the products investigated in most of these studies, such as films or books, are not likely to be consumed daily. Therefore, in this study, we analyze the effect of eWOM on low involvement products, which are inexpensive and enough for everyday spending. Given that low involvement products have unique characteristics such as low price, we conduct an experiment using a real sales dataset related to soft drinks. We also analyze the effect of eWOM in two social media platforms. We find that eWOM influences the sales of low involvement products, but such influence is dependent on the characteristic of the social media platform. Based on these results, we suggest that marketers and retailers selling low involvement products must consider eWOM, such as reviews, and differentiate their strategies based on their focused social media platform.

Keywords

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by a grant from Kyung Hee University in 2013.(KHU-20130525)

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