ONLINE COMMUNITIES AS REFERENCE GROUPS IN CONSUMER DECISION-MAKING (original) (raw)
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BAR: Brazilian Administration …, 2012
Persuasive messages are central to interpersonal influence in online communities, where consumers interact mainly through text. We employed a combination of netnography and computer-mediated discourse analysis to investigate how consumers exchange information related to products and brands in an online community. We identified a set of rhetorical strategies used by community members, including setting expectations, claiming expertise, prescribing, and celebrating acquiescence. Consumers employ these rhetorical strategies to influence each other's consumption decisions, report consumption decisions back to the community, and to gauge their influence on each other's choices. We compare this process to traditional types of interpersonal influence and discuss how our findings contribute to advancing the burgeoning literature on interpersonal influence in online contexts.
Who's Driving this Conversation? Systematic Biases in the Content of Online Consumer Discussions
Journal of Marketing Research
When consumers post questions online, who influences the content of the discussion more: the consumer posting the question or those who respond to the post? Analyses of data from real online discussion forums and four experiments show that early responses to a post tend to drive the content of the discussion as much as or more than the content of the initial query. Although advice seekers posting to online discussion forums often explicitly tell respondents which attributes are most important to them, the authors demonstrate that one common online posting goal, affiliation, makes respondents more likely to repeat attributes mentioned by previous respondents, even if those attributes are less important to the advice seeker or support a suboptimal choice given the advice seeker's decision criteria. Firms "listening in" on social media should account for this systematic bias when making decisions on the basis of the discussion content.
2021
Online marketing was extensively chosen as the most efficient option to shop during Covid-19 pandemic. Due to the prompt expansion of the digital era, a seller should be creative in using language to persuade buyers. This research aimed to investigate the use of speech acts and persuasion by cosmetics marketers in social commerce to persuade online shoppers. This descriptive research used netnography with pragmatics approach to answering the research questions. Data were collected from Facebook and Instagram by using manual netnography techniques which then scraped into excel as the corpus. After that, the data were analyzed by using the taxonomy of speech acts and persuasion categories. The results show that the use of directive speech acts dominates the persuasion in online marketing of cosmetic products. However, the various type of speech acts and persuasion were used by the online cosmetic sellers as a strategy to promote their products.
The Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing, special edition, Vol 4, No 1, pp56-73
Purpose -The potential influence of consumer generated communication in the form of online discussion fora has been overlooked by marketers. The purpose of this paper to explore the content of discussion and the relationships between posters on social networks using the wine sector as the research basis. Design/methodology/approach -The paper examines the current usage of discussion fora by wine enthusiasts through a netnographic approach. A non-probability purposive sample of wine discussion fora in three countries is employed to determine the content and style of the contributions posted.
Consequences of Consumer Interactions in Virtual Community
— Social networking has become the main online platform not only to Generation Y cohorts, but also to other Internet user groups including Generation X and Baby Boomers. This not only affecting the way Internet users conducts their daily life; it also affects marketers (online and offline) in terms of their marketing practices. Especially to online marketers, this should be seen as a huge opportunity to revamp and revisit their marketing strategies in line with the changes that is happening. This research looks into the consequences of consumers' participation in online communities or specifically in product-specific online forums. It investigates whether the participation in online community could influence consumers' consumption-related behaviors such as spreading online and offline word of mouth. An online survey was conducted on 289 users of online communities adopting convenience sampling technique. Six independent variables were regressed against online and offline word of mouth behavior. Results show that perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, social influence and group norms positively affects online word of mouth behavior whereas online perceived usefulness and group norms affect the offline word of mouth behavior.