The Influence Of Netizens' Online Comments On Receiver's Attitude And Consumption Willingness

The internet is developing fast and has become a part of people's life as an important channel to get information. At the meantime, User Generate Content (UGC) model has been widely adopted which enables netizens to deliver online comments based on their own consumption experience and this kind of comments have much greater influence and wider disseminating coverage than traditional word-of-mouth. In this context, the influence of netizens'online comments on information receivers'attitude and consumption decision making is of great prominence while the research on the persuasion effect of online comments has become a hot issue in both academic and practical field. This research adopts the quasi-experiment methodology and find out the comment differences, source credibility, brand familiarity and some other variables'own effect and interaction effect upon receivers'attitude and consumption willingness.This study contents 6 parts: The first part introduces the research background, the significance and innovation of this research and a research and analysis framework is made. The second part is the review of the relevant literature. The third part is a conclusion of independent variables and modeling. Some hypotheses are supposed in this part either. The fourth part is a brief introduction of research methodology and experiment design and conducting. The fifth part, which is the critical part of the paper, is data mining and analysis. In this part, the relations between the independent variables and information receivers'attitude and consumption willingness, which are the dependent variables, are studied, interpreted and concluded. The last part is the discussion, recommendation and research limitations.This study finds out 5 factors which have significant influence on online comments'persuasion effects through experiment and data analysis. The 5 factors are: positive or negative comments, brand familiarity toward the commented object, the perceived credibility of comment source, the comment information needs and usage experience and dependency towards internet and websites which publish the netizens'comments. Among them, positive or negative comments and brand familiarity toward the commented object have the greatest influence on information receivers'attitude and consumption behavior.The innovations of this study are: First, the research contents and independent variables, this study regard"comment source credibility"as a key variable and find out its influence on the persuasion effect of online comment. Second, the research methodology, the quasi-experiment method is adopted and it combines the advantages of experiment method and questionnaire method. Third, the research perspective, the study combines online comment communication effect research with consumers'behavior research and network marketing.