Where does electronic word of mouth collide?

The defining conceptualization of the construct: any positive or negative statement made by a potential, actual, or former customer about a product or company that is made available to a multitude of people and institutions over the Internet. Hennig-Thurau, Gwinner, Walsh, and Gremler's 2004 Electronic Word-of-Mouth via Consumer-Opinion Platforms gave this definition and studied why people write at all, finding motives such as concern for other consumers, the wish for social benefit, and the desire to help the company. This is the same underlying thing that the other labels on this page name: consumers talking to consumers online. It is not a distinct construct from an online review or from viral WOM, only the broadest name for the family they all belong to.[1]

Unit

One consumer statement posted online about a product

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Content of posts, motives for posting, and reach across opinion platforms

In information systems and marketing research the same construct is often studied under the label online consumer reviews: ratings and written evaluations that shoppers post on retail and platform pages and that later shoppers read before buying. Chevalier and Mayzlin's 2006 The Effect of Word of Mouth on Sales: Online Book Reviews compared the same titles across two retailers and found that better reviews raised a book's relative sales, and that review length and text mattered, so readers acted on the words and not only the stars. An online review is not a different construct from eWOM: it is one concrete form the umbrella label already covers, measured here by valence, volume, and effect on sales rather than by the writer's motives.[2]

Unit

One posted review, or an aggregate of reviews for a product

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Average rating, number of reviews, and review text as predictors of sales

The parent construct that all the online labels extend: informal, person-to-person talk about a product between people with no commercial stake in the exchange. Arndt's 1967 Role of Product-Related Conversations in the Diffusion of a New Product was one of the first controlled studies of this influence, tracking how a household's decision to try a new product followed from conversations with neighbours. Electronic word of mouth is defined as this same behaviour moved onto the Internet, so eWOM, online reviews, and viral WOM are all the online children of one older idea. The map for the offline parent lives on the word-of-mouth page; naming the online forms as if each were a fresh construct hides that they share this single root.[3]

Unit

One informal conversation about a product between two people

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Whether talk occurred, the tie between the talkers, and its effect on choice

The newest label for the same construct, used when online talk spreads quickly from person to person across social media and sharing tools, and often called online buzz. Berger and Milkman's 2012 What Makes Online Content Viral? analysed which articles people shared most and found that content stirring high arousal, such as awe or anger, spread more, which reframes the question as what makes people pass a message along. Viral WOM is not a separate construct from eWOM: it is the same consumer-to-consumer online communication seen through the lens of how far and fast it travels. The proliferation of names, viral, buzz, social-media WOM, is the jangle this page warns about, not evidence of distinct things.[4]

Unit

One shared message, scaled by how many onward shares it draws

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Share counts, forwarding rates, and the emotional content that drives passing along