An Empirical Study on the Importance of Electronic Word of Mouth in the Concierge Industry

The widespread access of electronic word of mouth (e-WOM) enables contemporary consumers to assess the opinions of others, irrespective of geographical boundaries, about products and services. This research examines the impact of e-WOM on building international brand awareness when the former is used as a core part of a company's overall digital marketing strategy. By applying the survey methodology, the findings provide support for this positive effect; namely, the integration of e-WOM in the overall digital marketing strategy and activities applied by an organization can enhance brand awareness beyond country borders and contribute towards the overall organizational effectiveness and success. Taken together, the study provides further insight into eWOM and cross-border brand awareness relationship and outlines several questions that deserve further study.

The Role of the Electronic Word-of-Mouth in the Hotel Industry

In the digital age, electronic word-of-mouth plays a role extremely important for the hospitality industry. Due to the intangibility of the tourism product, travelers need to seek information in order to reduce the perceived risk. They usually compare different options and search for accurate and reliable information to make choices, such as user-generated contents. Moreover, tourists pay much more attention to digital platforms that foster interaction and information exchange between users. This study aims to investigate, through an online questionnaire, the managerial behavior of 103 hotels of the province of Rimini towards the electronic word-of-mouth phenomenon. The findings highlight the proactive attitude of hotels towards the phenomenon, to increase the booking and to improve the service quality. The study conducted provides hints of originality because it filled some gaps emerging in the literature regarding the dealing with responses, the stimulation of generating comments, and the impact of online reviews on hotel performance.

Electronic Word-of-Mouth in the Service Industry

Word-of-mouth is today considered among the most effective marketing communication tools. Indeed, consumers trust more their friends or other consumers than companies, advertisements, and brands. Moreover, due to the digital revolution, the electronic word-of-mouth plays a central role in consumers' purchasing decisions. In particular, electronic word-of-mouth may be central in the context of services, where the perceived risk of the intangible offering triggers consumers' need to find preliminary support from other consumers. This chapter focuses on comments and reviews regarding tourist products and other services shared by customers on different types of online platforms. The empirical analysis sheds light on the role that key motivational drivers, such as customer satisfaction, altruism, and self-esteem, may have in affecting consumers' decision to share comments about traditional versus sharing economy businesses. Findings demonstrate that the observed motivational drivers significantly and differently affect consumers' decision to engage in electronic word-of-mouth.

When Consumers' Complaints Fall Into Public Domain

Despite previous studies having revealed that the content created by users in social media is predominantly positive, recent studies have challenged this understanding revealing by means of sentiment analysis the predominance of negative and neutral brand related content. The current chapter focuses on the new hybrid form of negative e-WOM in which individual´s complaints are directed at firms, which were originally limited to the domain of offline customer care teams. Thus, previous studies are reviewed from the area of crisis management and service recovery strategies with the intent to offer a relevant scope of theoretical propositions that may be considered by managers and researchers while preparing response strategies to deal with this new hybrid form of negative e-WOM. In total, eight theoretical propositions are presented and organized in three groups of guidelines associated to responses´ format, content, and context with fait-holders and hate-holders being considered as part of the negative e-WOM rhetoric.

How Consumers Respond to Editorial Communication Strategies

With the advent of Web 2.0 and the fact that brands can now communicate directly with consumers, it has been suggested that content marketing is replacing publicity. However, to the best of the authors' knowledge, no previous study has supported this relationship. The purpose of this chapter is to explore this theory, drawing a comparative study on how consumers respond to both approaches. The effects of content marketing and publicity on message credibility, attitude toward the brand and purchase intention are analyzed, as well as the impact of consumers' antecedents on these indicators. The findings indicate that publicity is still relevant and is not being replaced by content marketing. This chapter illustrates the power of content in influencing customer decision making and provides relevant insights into how content must be used to serve consumers' needs more effectively, allowing a 360º view.

Communicating Natural Calamity

This chapter aims at understanding the dynamics that led to the exchange and value co-creation/co-production in the interaction between P.A. and citizens during natural calamities. In addition, it proposes a horizontal communication model in which both actors cooperate to respond to crisis, a semantic and semiotic space on the net able to satisfy their information needs. When natural disasters occur, citizens' primary need is to reach as much information as possible about the status of loved ones possibly involved in the accident, road traffic, how to give an effective contribution to the cause without hindering, etc. On the other hand, P.A. and rescuers need to know as much information as possible about the reports, on the site of the disaster so as to intervene promptly to help the population in danger. Therefore, P.A. and citizens are called upon to cooperate to guarantee crisis containment, crisis management, and also future crisis prevention.

e-WOM Analysis Methods

Electronic word of mouth (e-WOM) is rapidly becoming an empowering tool for consumers to express their experiences on services or products, on social media or other platforms. Beyond the obvious implications of such content to potential consumers, interest is also high among researchers, industry players, and other stakeholders who strive to analyze before-and-after sales expectations, emotions, and perceptions of customers. The need to find efficient ways of extracting and then analyzing online content rendered the reuse of tools and methodologies initially applied in other fields as well as the development of new approaches. In this chapter, the authors identify high-impact scientific work related to e-WOM and point out the analytical methods for analyzing e-WOM content. Furthermore, this chapter refers to the most relevant studies employing such methods and their findings. More specifically, it discusses clustering, sentiment analysis, supervised and unsupervised machine learning, lexicon-based approaches, corpus-based approach, summarization and predicting, and regression analysis.

Using Sentiment Analysis for Evaluating e-WOM

Electronic word of mouth is one of the keys elements for marketing decision making. e-WOM has been focus of marketing research as technology and social media become larger part of consumers' lives. This study set out to examine e-wom concept with sentiment analysis methodology in service industry context. The structure of study is twofold including theoretical backgound of related concepts and application section. Theoretical background section contains electronic word of mouth, new consumer and sentiment analysis concepts, and included selected studies for sentiment analysis. The application section which this study has focus on includes a three-stage plan for sentiment analysis practices. Each stage has three different scenarios. One algorithm and one real-life application for each stage are included. Nine scenarios for different service organizations imply that sentiment analysis supported with other methodologies can contribute to understanding of electronic word of mouth.

Storytelling as an Approach to Voice Complaints and eWOM on Social Media/Facebook

Customer complaints are unavoidable in any businesses and how firms handle such complaints will affect the public's perception of the company's brand and reputation. While storytelling is being embraced by an increasing number of companies as a different way to communicate their brand, many customers are now also using storytelling as an approach to voice their unfavourable experiences on the social media in regards to a particular unsatisfactory purchase as part of electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM). Such creative and humorous complaints serve as a way to cut through the clutter in order to gain the company's attention. Those companies that embrace such complaints by responding in an equally humorous and creative manner as part of their service recovery process will manage to recover their customers as well as their employees. As such posts are often shared publicly on the Internet, they may become viral and thus can create great positive effect on the company's reputation. Hence, it is important to empower the employees to recover the services using untraditional responses.

Are Online Reviews Helpful for Consumers?

This chapter explores the elements influencing online reviews' usefulness by focusing on the language that consumers use when writing online reviews and on reviewers' attributes. By using text mining tools, the authors investigate how reviews' language affects their usefulness perception (i.e., the number of times readers have marked them as useful). The dataset consists of more than 54,000 online reviews from the most frequently used e-WOM source currently available and covers the period 2005-2017. The results suggest that word count and some of reviews' linguistic features (e.g., the subjectivity score, authenticity score) influence their usefulness perception. Reviewers' attributes (i.e., their number of reviews, age, class, and gender) also affect their reviews' perceived usefulness. The chapter concludes by describing the study results' implications for theory development, for empirical research, and for managerial practice.