Study On The Influence Of EWOM Via Virtual Community On Consumers' Purchase Behavior

Word of mouth is informal communication among consumers about specific product or service, seller's attributes and usage. It is considered that word of mouth is more credible than company-initiated information, and more influential in consumer decision making. With the popularity of internet, the size and range of word of mouth communication has been extended, and the influence of electronic word of mouth (Referred to as eWOM) even changes the life style of consumers and it has brought unprecedented opportunities and challenges for corporate marketing activity. Therefore, electronic word of communication has received extensive attention from both academics and practitioners for decades.Through the analysis of the research background, we found three research questions. Firstly, the traditional word of mouth is face to face communication among family, acquaintances and friends, while eWOM is based on computer-mediated communication occurs between anonymous consumers, therefore; the traditional communication theory may not be able to explain eWOM communication. It's essential for us to adjust the original theory to explain EWOM communication better. Secondly, the eWOM communication process is very complicated, appears to be a messy scene, it is difficult to use with a clear picture to describe the whole scene, to determine the information flow and to determine who influence who. Third, in the traditional word of mouth communication process, the opinion leaders play an important role. But we are not sure whether there are opinion leaders in EWOM communication process. So, it's important to determine whether they are opinion leaders in virtual community and how to find them.In order to solve above problems, the research focus on studying how EWOM influence consumer's purchase behavior. In this study, we use knowledge of communication, psychology, computer science and consumer behavior, as well as social exchange theory, trust theory, attribution theory to fully explain how EWOM impact the consumer's purchase behavior.The study consists of three parts. Based on literature review and qualitative research, we construct a concept model to explain how EWOM influence consumer's purchase behavior, in which the independent variables are the sender's characteristic, the website characteristic and the receiver characteristic, the dependent viable is the impact of eWOM on purchase behavior, and the mediating variable is the receiver's trust in eWOM, including cognitive trust and affective trust.This study collects data through questionnaires, and adopts Visual plus 1.04 and SPSS 17.0 for data analysis. Through empirical study, we find that the sender's expertise, homogeneity, tie strength and website trustworthiness have t positive effect on eWOM's impact on consumer, which is mediated by trust. The receiver's expertise not only has positive effect on eWOM effect, but also plays as a moderator between the sender's characteristics, the website trustworthiness and the receiver's trust in eWOM. When the receiver expertise is high, his trust in eWOM comes from the sender's expertise, while when the receiver expertise is low; he tends to use website trustworthiness as important clue for trust formation.In the second part, we use social network analysis method to study how the network structures of virtual community influence the eWOM communication. We get data of three typical consumption virtual communities by data capture programmer and we adopt Ucinet 6.0 and Netdraw to make data analysis. By data analysis, we get conclusion as follows.The consumption related virtual communities are loose and decentralized network, as well as scale free network. In the virtual community, most members have no influence, while a few members play a very important role, which we defined as opinion leaders. Through cluster analysis, we identified who are opinion leaders. Opinion leaders are in a central location of a virtual community. They are important in EWOM communication and their influence comes from their expertise, innovation and high involvement in special product. To some extent, the influence of virtual communities from the influence of opinion leaders and opinion leaders is an important asset of virtual community.Finally, suggestion for virtual community development and enterprise eWOM marketing are put forward.