Research On The Influence Path Of Negative Reviews On Willingness To Pay

With the transformation of the e-commerce industry into the competition pattern of the existing market,how to motivate potential consumers to purchase by merchants has become a topic of increasing concern among scholars and marketing managers.With the development of communication technology,the spread speed of online negative review is accelerating,and the spread channels are widening.The destructive effect on online word-of-mouth management of enterprises is increasingly prominent.However,scholars have not paid much attention to whether online merchants should carry out defensive response for negative reviews,and how to respond and form an effective word-of-mouth management model.At the same time,most researches focus on the impact of business responses on consumers who have suffered service failures from the perspective of service recovery theory,ignoring the impact of response to negative reviews on potential consumers.Therefore,it is urgent to solve the problems of how to manage the negative reviews by enterprises,how to respond to the negative reviews by merchants and how to affect the potential consumers.Based on signaling theory,this paper takes three different response strategies(no response VS standardized response VS personalized response)as explanatory variables,product attribution degree and brand attitude as mediating variables,prevention orientation as moderating variables,and potential consumers’ willingness to pay as explanatory variables,discusses the chain mediating mechanism of merchants’ response to negative reviews on product attribution degree,brand attitude and willingness to pay,and the moderating effect of prevention orientation,which analyzes the changes of consumption decision-making at multiple levels.The moderating chain mediating effect is tested by questionnaire and scene experiment,which is divided into two studies.Study 1 mainly verified the mediating effects of product attribution degree and brand attitude and chain mediating effects.Study 2 tested the robustness of chain mediation and further explored the moderating effect of prevention orientation in chain mediation.In this paper,variance analysis,multiple regression analysis,Bootstrapping analysis and other analysis methods are used to analyze and verify the obtained data.The results show that: Firstly,different response strategies have significant impact on potential customers’ willingness to pay: the effect of personalized response is more positive than no response and standardized response,and there is no significant difference between the latter two groups.Secondly,the mediating effect of product attribution and brand attitude is significant.Thirdly,under negative online reviews,the chain mediating effect between product attribution and brand attitude is significant between negative review response strategies and willingness to pay.Fourthly,prevention orientation negatively regulates the impact of brand attitude on purchase intention: Compared with potential consumers with high prevention orientation,brand attitude of consumers with low prevention orientation has more significant impact on willingness to pay.