Essays on cross-cultural electronic word-of-mouth

As we are headed toward the digital era, electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) has emerged as a significant factor influencing consumer behaviors. Therefore, it is necessary for businesses to understand and manage eWOM appropriately to maximize marketing outcomes. Additionally, the global adoption of the internet and mobile devices results in a huge variation in the cultural backgrounds of eWOM participants, rendering the tasks of understanding and managing eWOM even more complex and unfeasible. Therefore, through three distinctive but interconnected essays in this dissertation, I attempt to advance an understanding of eWOM across cultures.Despite numerous empirical studies on cross-cultural eWOM, there is currently no exhaustive/integrated reviews on cross-cultural eWOM research. Therefore, the first essay aims to comprehensively integrate and synthesize cross-cultural eWOM literature. Incorporating journal articles from the last 16 years, a framework featuring four research themes is provided. This framework can serve as an important foundation that scholars can used for theory development and future research, in the expectation that it would trigger a proliferation of cross-cultural eWOM theory which global marketers can utilize.Based on knowledge gaps identified in chapter 2, chapters 3 and 4 offer original empirical research contributing to the extant literature. Specifically, despite extant research investigating numerous antecedents of eWOM valence, none of the studies has yet examined signal of quality. Therefore, the second essay contributes to the literature by investigating the effect of quality signaling on eWOM valence, as well as how this relationship varies among different levels of cultural distance. Empirical results show that products that signal high quality are associated with more positive review valence. However, those with customers mainly from highly differentiated cultural origins do not benefit as much. Therefore, businesses should invest in the creation of quality signaling only if they target customers from low cultural distance origins. In addition, though chapter 3 results show that signaling quality to potential customers results in positive review sentiments, too much signaling may raise too much expectation in the mind of consumers. The third essay investigates this gap by providing an empirical investigation on the effect of negative disconfirmation of expectation on review sentiments. Also, this essay further argues that this relationship varies among individualistic and collectivistic customers. Empirical data shows that the effect of negative disconfirmation on negative reviews is more salient for customers who originate from individualistic cultures. Accordingly, businesses mainly serving individualistic customers must align customers’ expectations with the actual product experiences to reduce negative disconfirmation, therefore, reducing negative eWOM. On the other hand, businesses mainly serving collectivistic customers may slightly over-signal the products’ quality and still suffer negligible repercussion.In sum, this dissertation contributes to the literature by providing the very first systematic literature review on cross-cultural eWOM. Further, despite conclusive evidence on the relationship between negative disconfirmation and eWOM valence, no study has yet examined this relationship across cultures. As such, this dissertation fills this gap by examining the moderating role of individualism on the main relationship. Lastly, signals of quality remain unexplored as an antecedent of eWOM valence. Therefore, this dissertation adds to the extant literature by introducing quality signaling as another novel construct preceding eWOM valence, as well as investigating the moderating role of cultural distance on the focal relationship.