| With the arrival of Internet era, the influence of network on people’s life has been constantly deepened, and the carrier of reputation have been shifted from off-line to on-line. Internet is a platform of weak relationship, and Internet word-of-mouth(IWOM) exerts an unprecedented influence on the purchase decisions of consumers. Nowadays, researches about IWOM usually focus on pure positive or negative IWOM, and pay less attention to double-sided IWOM. However, due to the diversity of network, the IWOM that consumers face in reality mostly consist of both positive and negative information. Thus it is necessary to carried a comparative study which focus on such real character to find out the difference of their influence on customers’ purchase intention. On the other side, in order to explicit the range of application of double-sided IWOM, it is necessary to explore which effect of IWOM is better in different conditions. Therefore, the current research starts from IWOM and the publishing platform of IWOM to explore the mechanism of the influence of double-sided IWOM on customers’ purchase intention.Based on ELM Model and Two-sided Persuading Theory, the present research studied the influence of double-sided IWOM on customers’ purchase intention, and discuss the effects of IWOM number and publishing platform in the process. The research were designed 2*2*2 between subjects design. According to the research, the influence of lower-negative IWOM on customers’ purchase intention is stronger than that of pure-positive IWOM. The difference between the effect of lower-negative IWOM and that of pure-positive IWOM is insignificant when the IWOM number is fewer and when it’s published on the third-party site. The results of the experiment demonstrated the influence of double-sided IWOM on customers’ purchase intention, and revealed the application range of double-sided IWOM. These conclusions provided certain reference values for marketing managers to practice word-of-mouth marketing, which plays an important role in marketing managing. |
