Persuaded by Electronic Word of Mouth (eWOM): Network Coproduction Model on Chinese Social-Ecommerce App

In the era of Web 2.0 with prominent feature of user-generated content, the phenomenon of coproduction prevails in inter-consumer communication as well – consumers produce contents about product experience and evaluations to share and to support each other, rather than being passively influenced by marketers or key opinion leaders. The Little Red Book (LRB), a social-ecommerce unicorn in China, encourages users to share experience and opinion on cosmetic products and other aspects of life, even though it is a weak-tie community without much intimacy. This research revolves around the Network Coproduction Model of electronic Word of Mouth (Kozinets et al. 2010) and tries to test if eWOM of ordinary users can influence others’ product attitude and purchase intention. Two variables of eWOM, self-disclosure and product price, are manipulated to design a 2 (self-disclosure: descriptive, evaluative) × 2 (product price: high, low) factorial experiment. The researcher conducts an electronic experiment and a follow-up survey (N = 210) with 8 LRB prototype posts. The result indicates that LRB users mostly identity LRB as a supportive and honest community, even though they are not particularly active or involved here; product attitude and purchase intention are highly correlated; descriptive self-disclosure is more effective in persuading consumers than evaluative one is, and the combination of descriptive self-disclosure and high-cost product yields the most positive product attitude.