How consumers persuade each other: rhetorical strategies of interpersonal influence in online communities.
| Autor | Scaraboto, Daiane |
| Cargo | Report |
Introduction
As participation in online communities and social networks becomes increasingly popular (Valck, Bruggen, & Wierenga, 2009), their relevance to the understanding of consumer behavior also grows (Dholakia, Bagozzi, & Pearo, 2004; Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010; Pitta & Fowler, 2005). Online communities, particularly those associated with social networks, make it easier for consumers to chat about mutual interests, help one another with questions, voice complaints, share experiences and information about brands, and collaborate in the development of new products (Kozinets, Hemetsberger, & Schau, 2008). These online platforms of interaction have affected several aspects of consumer behavior and associated managerial practices, including value creation (e.g. Schau, Muniz, & Arnould, 2009), brand loyalty (Beaven & Laws, 2007), and brand experience (Boulaire, Graf, & Guelmani, 2008).
Observing consumers in their online activities, marketing researchers have recently started to investigate how interpersonal influence manifests online. Studies on electronic word-of-mouth (e.g. Andreassen & Streukens, 2009; Kozinets, Valck, Wojnicki, & Wilner, 2010; Ward & Ostrom, 2006), online opinion leadership (e.g. Lyons & Henderson, 2005; Senecal & Nantel, 2004), as well as on the dynamics of online reference groups (Valck, 2005) have been conducted that start to shed light on these new forms of networked consumer influence. This recent but accumulating literature suggests that interpersonal influence in online contexts is very similar to offline interpersonal influence, despite happening on a scale never before contemplated (Gossieaux & Moran, 2010). There is, however, one fundamental point of difference between interpersonal influence that unfolds in online communities and social networks and that which happens in offline contexts. In contrast to face-to-face relationships, interaction in online communities is mainly textual. These text-based conversations are usually stored on a community's website and become accessible to any registered member. These characteristics provide consumers--and researchers alike--with a track record of influential exchanges, particularly those which happen at one specific stage of the consumer decision process: the information search.
Past research has studied consumers' practices of information search and interpersonal influence mostly using surveys and experimental methods (e.g. Gilly, Graham, Wonfinbarger, & Yale, 1998; Mourali, Laroche, & Pons, 2005). Despite recent efforts to contextualize our knowledge of online interpersonal influence (e.g. Kozinets et al., 2010) we still lack a fully-developed and culturally informed theoretical perspective that illuminates the processes through which consumers influence each other online. In particular, we do not know much about the influence strategies that consumers use when cues about actual behaviour are limited and text is the main form of interaction. Therefore, our goals in this paper are to complement and extend prior research by addressing the following question: how do consumers exert, verify, and respond to interpersonal influence in online communities?
To gain insight into these issues, we investigated the interactions among participants of an online community dedicated to discussions of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood. This choice of community is justified in that consumption decisions related to motherhood, pregnancy, and childbirth tend to be high involvement ones (Vardeman & Aldoory, 2008). In this context, consumers perceive high risk in making wrong choices and consequently extend the information search phase of the consumption decision process--where interpersonal influence most commonly happens (Peterson & Merino, 2003).
Because most interactions in the investigated online community rely on text, we collected textual, qualitative data through netnography, and interpreted it with the aid of computer-mediated discourse analysis techniques (Herring, 2002) and rhetorical analysis (Zachry, 2009). While discourses encompass the universe of dialogic communication, rhetoric is the active, planned, effectual method by which persuasion is articulated. Hence, in any communication, one may choose to engage in rhetoric, but one always engages in discourse (Potter, 1996).
Rhetorical analysis has proven useful in understanding persuasion in social politics (e.g. Fischer & Forrester, 1993), social movements (e.g. Benford & Snow, 2000), institutional change (e.g. Suddaby & Greenwood, 2005), and business practices (e.g. Green, 2004; Norreklit, 2003). Notably, this approach has not yet been used to understand interpersonal influence among consumers. We believe that drawing on computer-mediated discourse analysis and rhetorical analysis for this purpose is valuable and addresses limitations of the perspectives thus far advanced to explain online interpersonal influence, which do not fully appreciate the textual nature of this phenomenon.
Considering the question we address and our deployment of netnography, computer-mediated discourse, and rhetorical analysis, our study's contributions are twofold. First, by looking at the naturally occurring interactions of consumers in online communities, we offer a counterpart to experimental studies and extend prior work that has taken an interpretive approach to interpersonal influence in consumer decision processes (e.g. Andrews & Boyle, 2008; Kozinets et al., 2010; Valck, 2005). In doing so, we offer a culturally informed and unobtrusive interpretation of consumers' online interactions that integrates seemingly disparate approaches to the phenomena through its focus on persuasive texts. Second, this study extends our understanding of how interpersonal influence occurs in online contexts. By tracking online conversations, we identify the rhetorical strategies employed by consumers in online communities and offer initial insights on how influence unfolds through the messages consumers produce.
Our paper is organized as follows. We first present key elements of interpersonal influence theory that are relevant for understanding the dynamics of online consumer influence. We then describe our context and our methods. Our findings and our analysis are presented next, and we conclude with implications for theory and future research.
Literature Review
We briefly review the literature in online communities, the context in which we investigate online interpersonal influence, and revisit the concepts of reference groups and word-of-mouth in light of this context and in their relation to the information search stage of the consumer decision process.
Online communities
The notion of community has always been central to society; it is connected to the idea of a shared space, feelings of belonging, and the need for intimate inter-relationships. As pointed out by Bauman (2001), human beings present a desire to belong to a group with whom they can identify and share feelings, beliefs, and common interests.
Definitions of community emerged in the sociology literature at the beginning of the twentieth century, and a number of competing notions quickly followed, each of which emphasized place, common interests, or harmonious bonds as conditions for the development of these special groupings. In general, sociologists characterized community as a particular form of social organization based on small groups, for example neighborhoods, small towns, or geographically limited spaces (Delanty, 2003). Overall, most early definitions of community had geographical proximity as an integral component.
With the advent and dissemination of technologies enabling real-time communication over distance, the requisite of physical proximity has been reconsidered. Several scholars now suggest that communities may be established by factors other than shared locality; for example the perceived need for cooperation in order to achieve common goals (Baker & Ward, 2002), the existence of shared symbols (Cohen, 1985), or a commonality of interests that transcend geographical boundaries, akin to a sense of spirit that cannot be defined by geography, environment, or activity (Pardy, 1994).
There have been several attempts to define and categorize the numerous types of communities flourishing on the Internet. The definition of online communities as "social aggregations that emerge from the Internet when enough people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace" (Rheingold, 1993, p. 5) is considered one of the most relevant to describe and understand online groupings and is the one adopted in this research.
Relationships among individuals who participate in virtual communities vary enormously. Members may be offering or searching for advice, exchanging technical information and knowledge, or talking about events or other community members. All of these involve activities that transform virtual communities into emulations of a physical community, suggesting a close social and personal link between the online individual and his/her life outside the Internet (Fox, 2004).
Prior studies investigating interfaces between online communities and consumption have explored the role of online communities in value creation (e.g. Schau et al., 2009), the development of brand loyalty (Muniz & Schau, 2005; Yim, Tse, & Chan, 2008) and resistance practices (Kozinets & Handelman, 2004) in online communities. Researchers have also identified some values and meanings attributed to consumption specific to online contexts (Porter, 2004). Although these studies represent a broad range of topics considering online communities and consumption, our goal is to investigate the process of interpersonal influence among consumers who interact over the Internet. Therefore, we will focus the remaining of this review on studies which have explored the impact consumers' participation in...
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