Electronic word of mouth - A study on forwarding behavior within Vietnam service context

Abstract

The era of digitalization has witnessed a tremendous growth in eWOM as an important source of reference for purchasing decisions, especially in the service industry. Compared to traditional advertising, today’s customers are increasingly dependent on eWOM, which may cause a viral effect when this piece of information is exponentially distributed. With the aim to leverage the power of eWOM in Marketing, the research is intended to uncover the impact of interpersonal and non-interpersonal forces on the behavior of forwarding eWOM, as well as to uncover the correlation between these two forces. The proposed hypotheses are adopted from Bansal’s WOM process model, which was built on the original concept of Gilly et al. (1998) and WOM theory of Bistor (1990). The findings of an investigation on 361 Vietnamese respondents show positive impacts of two interpersonal variables, namely sender’s and receiver’s expertise, as well as one non-interpersonal variable – deliberate search on the behavior of forwarding eWOM. In addition, two correlations have been discovered between interpersonal and non-interpersonal forces through the positive impacts of the expertise and perceived risk of receivers on the eWOM active search. Besides its contribution to eWOM theory in general, and to Vietnam service sector in particular, the research also shed light on customer behaviors towards eWOM so that marketers could strategically take a full advanteage of eWOM.