National cultures and their impact on electronic word of mouth: a systematic review

Abstract

PurposeThis paper aims to summarize peer-reviewed journal articles on national cultures and electronic word of mouth (eWOM) behavior, identify the main findings and patterns among those studies and discuss research gaps that need to be addressed in the future.Design/methodology/approachA systematic review process was utilized to analyze peer-reviewed journal articles on both eWOM and national cultures. The main research questions were defined, then proceeded by the identification of exclusive and inclusive criteria to search for relevant articles, which were further filtered based on abstracts and full texts, and then scrutinized for main findings and major variables such as countries, cultural variables and data collection methods.FindingsAn analysis of 52 papers shows that national cultures, primarily Hofstede's dimensions, influence the willingness of individuals to share eWOM, how they write eWOM and the extent to which they use eWOM to make decisions. Although the reviewed studies have provided insightful implications for marketing theory and practice, the present paper has identified a number of important questions that warrant future research attention.Originality/valueeWOM is continually being employed as a popular source of information for consumers throughout different countries to make their purchase decisions. However, eWOM behavior differs from country to country due to national cultures, and managers' eWOM strategies that work in one country may not be applicable in another. Therefore, there has been an increasing interest in this topic. Nevertheless, it remains unclear which subjects have been addressed and what areas are yet to be investigated. This paper presents a comprehensive review of how national cultures affect eWOM behavior by drawing upon prior research and provides directions for future research contributions.

Consumer-brand heuristics in luxury hotel reviews

“…Heuristics include the material side of the luxury hotel brand experience, such as the quality of the room and its environment, as well as cues coming from the social and subjective part of the consumer and context, interrelationships between people, employees and other consumers (Dang and Raska, 2022; Feng et al , 2021; Lee and Kim, 2021). Heuristics are efficient cognitive processes that ignore some information for efficient decision-making.…”

“…Also, in consumer reviews, customer complaints for high-end hotels are mainly related to service issues, whereas customers of low-end hotels are frequently annoyed by facility-related problems (Hu et al , 2019). The helpfulness of online reviews has been emphasized by previous research and is especially relevant in circumstances subjected to deception, as well as when consumers need to differentiate and interpret many reviews and information (Dang and Raska, 2022; Kollmer et al , 2022; Lo and Yao, 2019). The “helpful” rating available on various review websites such as TripAdvisor provides additional information to businesses and consumers regarding the value of a peer comment and is a measure of direct response from users who read it (Wang and Li, 2019).…”

“…Using hotel data, Moon et al (2021) reviewed both authentic and fake reviews and found them more effective using text categorization than other studies using mainly computational linguistics. Dang and Raska (2022) also found that consumers differ regarding the heuristics used for eWOM based on their culture. For these reasons, a combination of theories may be more useful for investigating consumers' evaluations of online review helpfulness and the heuristics they use to avoid deception.…”

“…Modern consumers have an overwhelming number of interactive platforms available to express themselves and obtain information about brands, including online customer reviews (Chen et al , 2020; Dang and Raska, 2022; Stevens et al , 2022). The digital environment provides various communication solutions where customers can post electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) messages and reviews, including general and specialized review aggregators, such as Yelp and TripAdvisor, that focus on hospitality brands, such as luxury hotel brands (Li et al , 2020; Zhang et al , 2023).…”

Spatial differences and underlying mechanisms in electronic word of mouth in the foodservice industry: A case of Sanya, China

“…Previous research has shown that individualism/collectivism and uncertainty avoidance affect consumer eWOM [ 36 ]. Epecifically, collectivists provide less negative eWOM, have higher satisfaction and givehigher ratings.…”