The dissemination and impacts of deceptive eWOM: a dynamic process perspective

ABSTRACT

To minimise risk, consumers seek out eWOM, recommendations, and reviews from others before making purchasing decisions. However, it is not uncommon to see companies masterminding deceptive eWOM, disguising promotional messages as user-generated product reviews to attract and retain consumers. The extant literature is extremely limited regarding deceptive eWOM and its long-term effects. Ours is the first longitudinal study to examine consumers’ belief and attitude changes in the context of deceptive eWOM. This study found that, in a herding situation, deceptive eWOM can strongly influence changes in consumers’ beliefs and attitudes, whether in the early phase or mainstream phase, at the pre-adoption stage. If deceptive eWOM emerges earlier, it has a more powerful influence later. At the post-adoption stage, once they have used it, consumers may change their evaluations of a new product. However, this new evaluation is still subject to the initial anchoring effect brought by deceptive eWOM. If consumers sense deceptive eWOM and attribute it to a certain responsible party, the anchoring effect will be weakened. These findings provide further knowledge and understanding of the effects of deceptive eWOM, with implications for firms seeking to develop more effective eWOM marketing strategies.

KEYWORDS:

• And phrases: deceptive eWOM
• fake review
• herd behaviour
• information cascade
• longitudinal study

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Funding details

This work was supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology Taiwan. Under Grant [numbers MOST 104-2410-H-305-058 -]