An Empirical Study on the Impact of Negative Online Word-of-Mouth on Consumer's Purchase Intention

Abstract

With the development of modern e-commerce, shopping online has completely changed the traditional commodity marketing model and consumer habits. More and more consumers use the online medium to distribute unfavorable experiences. Many previous studies have confirmed that negative word-of-mouth has a greater impact on consumers than positive word-of-mouth. However, there are few studies explaining how negative word-of-mouth affect consumers. To fill the existing research gap, this research proposed and empirically tested a negative online word-of-mouth on consumer's purchase intention model, investigating the influence of communicator characteristics, information features and receiver characteristics on trust and consumer's purchase intention. We conducted a survey in the form of a questionnaire and the empirical results showed that negative online word-of-mouth communicator's relationship strength with receiver, recipients' trust tendency and product involvement, significantly influence receivers' purchase intention, while the quantity, quality and information intensity of negative online word-of-mouth, positively affect receivers' trust in word-of-mouth, which further influences their purchase intention. Finally, this research proposed some substantive suggestions on the impact of negative online word-of-mouth on consumer's purchase intention.