The relationship between Internet addiction and negative eWOM

ABSTRACT

Customers prevalently use social media (SM) to post their experiences and to review others’ experiences. This study investigated how Internet addiction (IA) influenced customers’ word-of-mouth behaviors on SM after a service failure, focusing on both young and older customers. Two experiments were conducted. The first study was conducted with young customers and second experiment with older customers. Results suggest that the group of young customers had significantly higher levels of IA, compared to older customers. The analysis identified that IA and functional/technical service failure partially influenced four negative types of electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) (i.e. Badmouthing, Tattling, Spite, and Feeding the Vultures). Both young and older customers tended to show more negative eWOM types for technical service failures. For the functional service failures, IA was the main predictor of negative eWOM for both young and older customers.

摘要

客户普遍使用社交媒体来发布他们的体验并回顾总结其他人的经验。本研究调查了互联网成瘾（IA）在服务失败后如何影响客户在社交媒体上的口碑行为，专注于年轻和老年客户。本研究进行了两个实验。第一项研究是与年轻顾客进行的，第二项是针对老年顾客进行的实验。结果表明，与年长顾客相比，年轻顾客群体的IA水平显著较高。分析发现，IA和功能/技术服务失败部分影响了电子口碑（eWOM）的四种负面类型（即说坏话, 搬弄是非, 恶意攻击和喂养秃鹰）。对于技术服务失败, 年轻和年长的顾客都倾向于显示更负面网络口碑类型。对于功能服务失败，IA是年轻和老年客户负面电子口碑的主要预测指标。

KEYWORDS:

• Internet addiction behavior
• social media
• word-of-mouth
• service failure
• service recovery

关键词:

• 网络成瘾行为
• 社交媒体
• 口碑
• 服务失败
• 服务恢复

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Aviad A. Israeli http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7223-8734