The Effect Of Image-based Online Reviews On Customer Perception And Purchase Intention

With the development of online shopping and the penetration of smartphone,image-based online reviews had been the major presentation format of reviews.Online reviews were an important product information source for customers when making purchase decision.In practice,image reviews were considered as an important marketing strategy to attract potential customers for online vendors and as a key source of product information for future customers.Some vendors try to stimuli their buyers to post customers'image by cash rewards in order to attract more customers and reach more great sales.Image reviews present product pictures that customers take personally,even customers' selfies with the products.Prior research examined the influence of review presentation format,but did not focus on image format.Little is known about customers' perception on image online reviews.scholars should be concerned how image reviews are perceived helpful and what that depends on.It will be hot topic in future research.This study tries to deepen research about image reviews.First,based on media richness theory and cognitive fit theory,this study focused on the product image of online reviews.This study developed a theoretical model to analyze the effect of image reviews across product type and gender.The 2×2×2 between-subject experimental design was conducted to test hypotheses.The results demonstrated that compared to text review,the influence of image format on customers'perception was more significant,but in varying degrees across product type and gender.This study found that image format had more positive impact for experience product's understanding compared to search product.The result also showed that the effect of image format on experience product was not significant greater for females than males,but the perception improvement degree from text to image reviews was saliently different between genders.Second,Image online reviews can directly indicate the socioeconomic status(SES)of reviewers,which is completely different from text reviews.However,image reviews are starting to be more deeply explored the effect of reviewers' SES disclosures on customer purchase intention.Based on status consumption and self-presentation concern,this study uses context experimental method and eye-tracking method to examine the social status effect of reviewers in different consumption settings and their underlying mechanism.The first experiment was conducted with eye tracking,which is used to test the subjects' fixation behavior of the reviewer's SES information in the text comments.The findings demonstrate that SES disclosure of reviewers has a significant influence on customers'purchase intentions,indicating that participants have higher purchase intention when they perceive that the products are recommended by high-SES reviewers than by low-SES reviewers.However,this social status effect occurs when the product is consumed in a public setting but does not occur when the product is consumed in a private setting.This study also finds that participants with high self-presentation concerns would be significantly influenced by reviewers' SES when a product is consumed in public,but participants with low self-presentation concern would not be influenced.In addition,based on opinion evolution model,this study used RAS model to discuss the dynamic opinion evolution of customers when they read image-based online reviews.The MatLab simulation results further clarified the dynamic processing of SES information in image reviews and the process of attitude updating.Third,this study focused on the dual effect of product image and reviewer SES,and how they influenced customers trust.Then,with the improvement of trust on image-based online reviews,would customers'purchase intention increase?Product image was different information from and reviewer SES for customers to make a purchase intention.Different information needs different mode of information processing.And cognitive and affective trust may also be triggered by different mode of information processing.According,this study applies HSM as our theoretical basis to explore the drivers of cognitive and affective trust toward image reviews.This study uses context experimental method and eye-tracking method to examine our hypothesis.The results showed that product images had positive effect on customers'cognitive trust,but cognitive trust could not influence customers'purchase intention significantly.Reviewer SES also had positive effect on affective trust,and affective trust would influence customers' purchase intention significantly and positively.The result also showed that it had clear correlation between cognitive trust and affect trust.The second eye-tracking experiment found that when reviewer's SES background information is virtualized with mosaic,there is no significant difference in fixation time.In addition,this study used the extended HK model and MatLab software to carry out simulation experiments.It is found that in the process of consumer opinion evolution,other consumers are more likely to change their own views and accept the review sender's views under the higher interpersonal attraction of the sender of graphic comments,and then gradually reach an agreement.This study focused on two aspects of product image and reviewer SES,using contextual experiment,eye tracking methods and Matlab stimulation,which could complement each other to better verify perceived usefulness of product image and the impact of reviewer SES on purchase intention.According to different types of products and target customers,image-based online reviews should be correctly used to promote the positive influence of customers'purchase intention.