Page 148 - The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

140 The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

Trust was found to play a more significant role in intention to shop on-
line for women than for men. This can be explained by the fact that trust
has been shown to be related to the degree to which a person depends
upon other people (Deutsch, 1958; Rousseau, Sitkin, Burt, & Camerer,
1998). As women are typically characterized as being more concerned
with how others react to and utilize their opinions—whereas men simply
want to express their opinions—it seems reasonable to find that trust is
more fundamental as a precursor to shopping behavior for women than
for men. The managerial implication suggested by these findings is that
website activity in the form of posting comments or product perceptions,
as well as encouraging responses to these comments, engages men and
women respectively, which not only enhances WOM quality (Brown,
Broderick, & Lee 2007) but also positively affects site homophily and site
tie strength (Awad & Ragowsky, 2008). This leads to an increased percep-
tion of credibility for the website and also increases online trust, ultimately
affecting the intention to purchase.
Finally, Kozinets, deValck, Wojnicki, and Wilner (2010) maintained that
marketing messages placed in social media are systematically altered by the
very process of embedding them. The authors argued that the following
criteria must be addressed if an embedded marketing message is to be ef-
fective: (a) consistency with the character narrative of the social media (e.g.,
helpfulness narrative, professional narrative, communal narrative), (b) con-
sistency with the communications forum (e.g., blog, social networking site,
etcetera), and (c) fit with the community’s norms as they relate to the mes-
sage objectives. If one gains congruency with these factors, then the mar-
keting message is said to gain greater acceptance and be more effective.

The Impact of Negative WOM

Negative WOM is defined as an interpersonal communication between
two interested parties concerning a marketing organization or product that
denigrates the object of the communication (Weinberger, Allen, & Dillon,
1981). While it is well established that negative information typically has
more impact than positive information on consumer judgment (Skowronski
& Carlston, 1989), this finding may not extend to the study of the relative
impact of positive versus negative WOM, particularly when related to
brand choice in familiar categories, or even in more general investigations
of the effect (Adjei, Noble, & Noble, 2010; Asur & Huberman, 2010; East,
Hammond, & Lomax 2008; Liu, 2006).
There are many studies that show how the presence of mediating fac-
tors, such as accessibility, diagnosticity, and/or the nature of one’s