Effect of Individualism on E-Word of Mouth (E-WOM): Theory and Evidence

摘要

A large proportion of travel services is consumed internationally by customers from a variety of cultures. For example, a record 66.96 million Americans traveled abroad in 2016 (Wood, 2017) and direct spending by resident and international travelers in America was $2.8 billion a day (US travel, 2017). Similarly, approximately 131 million Chinese customers traveled overseas in 2017 and spending by Chinese tourists reached $261 billion in 2016 (Nielson, 2017). A critical cultural difference across customers from America and China, in particular, and a variety of cultures, in general, is the difference between individualism and collectivism. Extant international marketing literature has studied the moderating role of culture on the effect of e-WOM on market share (Tang, 2017). However, we have limited understanding of how differences in cultures lead to e-WOM. Considering the importance of e-WOM in travel-related services and international context, practitioner interest in the impact of individualism on sales, and the lack of research on the effect of consumer culture differences on e-WOM, we study the following research questions: What is the impact of individualism on user review rating valence? What are some of the moderators of this relationship between individualism and user review rating valence? Specifically, we investigate two moderators, brand preference and experience of premium variants.