Effectiveness of Input Forms in Word-of-Mouth Reviews
Mami Iwai (AY 2011)
The importance of consumers' impressions and opinions about services and products, such as word-of-mouth and reviews, has long been emphasized. More recently, social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook have made it easier for people to communicate with each other. In such an environment, consumers tend to rely more on word-of-mouth communication as well as advertising when purchasing services and products. In light of this situation, research institutes are actively conducting studies on how to extract useful information from word-of-mouth communication and how to manage existing word-of-mouth communication. On the other hand, there is little research on how to support the generation of word-of-mouth information that is useful for consumers' purchase decisions.
In this study, we focused on the input form for generating word-of-mouth messages and compared the commonly used free-form input form with a question-form input form that suggests the content to be described here, in order to verify the effect on the usefulness of word-of-mouth reviews. Specifically, H1: Question-form input form improves the usefulness of reviews, and H2: Question form improves the ease of writing reviews.
Two subject experiments were conducted to test the hypotheses. In the first experiment, 24 subjects were asked to create word-of-mouth reviews using an open-ended input form and a questioned input form, and were asked to complete a questionnaire about the ease of writing each form. In the second experiment, another 24 subjects were asked to evaluate the reviews generated in the first experiment and rate their usefulness according to the indicators used in the questioned input form.
The results of the first experiment showed that the question form had the following effects: the number of characters in the review increased, and the number of indicators included in the review increased. In H2, the open-ended input form was easier to write.
The results of the second experiment showed that in H1, "increasing the number of characters" had a positive effect on the usefulness of the review, but a negative effect after a certain number of characters. In H2, we qualitatively identified indicators of positive and negative impact, suggesting that flexible selection and sequencing of indicators to be written from the questionnaire survey may be useful in improving the ease of writing and other aspects of the input form in the form of questions.
This study showed that the format of the input form affects the usefulness of the review. However, we also found that, in some cases, the format can reduce the usefulness of the form. In the future, we plan to develop more diverse input form designs, test their effectiveness, and improve the input form design. We would like to improve the design of input forms and propose input forms that support the generation of useful reviews. Another possibility is to verify the effectiveness of the input form in reviewing intangible services such as accommodation and restaurants.
(Translated by DeepL)