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Webcare Summary
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Summary of the course Webcare of Tilburg University (lecture slides, additional notes and summary of articles).
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Lecture 1: Introduction WebcareIntroduction
Web 1.0 (1996)
• Organizations control the content
• Just another medium in the mix
• Mainly oneway communication
• Mostly read-only web
• Around 250.000 sites with 45 million global users
Web 2.0 (2006)
• Users control the content
• Other way of communication
• Mainly two-way communications
• Around 80.000.000 sites with more than 1 billion global users
Article Hennig-Thurau et al. (2010)
Webcare as metaphor of a pinball machine. The pinball machine itself is the online environment and the ball
is the metaphor for the content that is posted online. Because it was posted online, a lot of reactions
appeared. A lot of people do something with the content, like sharing, retweeting and give comments
(positive or negative). Is there something a company can do? That is equal to the flippers in a pinball
machine. Try to redirect the content and the sentiment towards the content online. You can post a
statement or responding to all different messages that are posted online.
In the era of new media, managing customer relationships is like playing pinball – companies serve up a
‘‘marketing ball’’ (brands and brand-building messages) into a cacophonous environment, which is then
diverted and often accelerated by new media ‘‘bumpers,’’ which change the offering’s course in chaotic ways.
After the marketing ball is in play, marketing managers continue to guide it with agile use of the ‘‘flippers,’’ but
the ball does not always go where it is intended to and the slightest miscue can be amplified into a
catastrophic crisis.
What is webcare?
The act of engaging in online interactions with (complaining) consumers, by actively searching the web to
address consumer feedback (e.g., questions, concerns, and complaints).
Reaction of KLM as a response to an overbooked flight
Really looked like a standardized message. It is not a personal response.
Sharing information via social media is oftentimes a quicker way to get response from a company then fill
out a form on a website.
Opportunities and threats
What are opportunities and threats of webcare?
• Valuable feedback and damage control are opportunities for organizations. Improve things in the
company to make things better.
• Miscommunication and not everyone has a social media account are threats for organizations.
• Great chance that you get an answer is an opportunity for customers.
• Make use of the power of the crowd. Many people will see the message, it could be damaging to the
organization. They try to be as quick as possible and try to help you as good as possible.
• Threats for customers are vague comments and sometimes your case is too personal or too private to put
it on internet. You don’t want that the whole crowd can see your case.
For organizations
• + Damage control
• + Valuable feedback, improve things in the company to make things better
• - Open for interpretation, so maybe miscommunication
,For customers
• + Quick answer
• + Make use of the power of the crowd. Many people will see the message, it could be damaging to the
organization. They try to be as quick as possible and try to help you as good as possible.
• - Fake comments
• - Sometimes it is too private, you don’t want everyone to see it online. We don’t always want the crowd to
see our problem.
Opportunities and threats for organizations (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010)
• Choose carefully: depends on the target group.
• Pick the application or make your own: sometimes the right application may not be available yet.
• Ensure activity alignment: social media activities are all aligned with each other.
• Media plan integration: relationship between social media and traditional media. Integration is key! They
are both part of the same in customers’ eyes. Your corporate image.
• Access for all: checking that all employees may access the social media applications. Blocking off
Facebook on corporate PCs for fear that staff might spend too much time networking instead of working
(cyberloafing).
Five points about being social
• Be active: if you want to develop a relationship with someone, it is always advisable to take the lead and
to be active. Social media are all about sharing and interaction, so ensure that your content is always
fresh and that you engage in discussions with your customers.
• Be interesting: if you would like your customers to engage with you, you need to give them a reason for
doing so. Firs step is to listen to your customers. Find out what they would like to hear. Then develop and
post content that fits those expectations.
• Be humble: before you enter any application, first take some time to discover it and to learn about its
history and basic values.
• Be unprofessional: it really is a rule online. It differs from other communication plans. It do not have to be
as smooth as television advertising is. You also can talk more like a person as you can see in the KLM
response. You can make it more personal.
• Be honest: if you are not honest. Oftentimes people will see what the truth is and then of course it is really
unreliable for your organization.
Posters versus viewers (i.e. ‘bystanders’)
,According to social sharing of emotion theory, humans have a natural tendency to share emotional
experiences with others.
Cognitive dissonance occurs when people are confronted with inconsistent attitude or beliefs. The
negative intrapersonal state thereby motivates them to reduce the aversive psychological state. Existing
customers may experience cognitive dissonance when companies fail to provide a product or a service that
meets their expectations, or when they see concerns surrounding the general business conduct of firms.
One way to reduce such dissonance is to openly deliberate a negative experience and announce how they
might behave in response to companies' failings. However, publicly revealing their negative feelings can
bring about two opposite consequences. As presented in Fig. 1, we identify two competing theoretical
explanation self-prophecy and catharsis through venting - that may impact customers' subsequent
purchase behavior.
The self-prophecy approach posits that engaging in pre-behavioral cognitive work of stating a sequence
of behavioural intentions leads people to become committed to what they had stated. Thus, after
customers elaborate on their negative feelings and thoughts about a company by posting e-NWOM, their
negative attitudes and opinions serve as a cognitive frame for their future purchases from the company.
Customers who create e-NWOM go through a process of self-prophecy by elaborating
their unsatisfying experience with a company and thereby strengthening their negative attitudes and
opinions, which decreases their future purchases from the given company, as suggested
using a minus sign in Fig. 1.
On the contrary, the venting approach provides a competing explanation of the posting effect in that it
focuses on the power of emotional release through venting. Creating messages in a stressful situation has
been shown to reduce the intense emotion of the message creator in various contexts. Others show that
venting about workplace injustice reduces intentions to retaliate and increases
the levels of psychological well-being and personal resolution. Nyer and Gopinath (2005) find that the
emotional release from complaining behavior reduces customer dissatisfaction. Those in favor of venting
maintain that expressing e-NWOM alleviates the negative reactions of those who share their unsatisfying
experience with a company because of the catharsis that the venting behaviour provides (Berger, 2014).
The expected positive impact of venting is suggested using a plus sign in Fig. 1.
The aforementioned effects of posting e-NWOM can be moderated by the nature of the relationship
between the firm and the poster (Chiou, Hsu, & Hsieh, 2013; Gr_egoire et al., 2009). According
to Aggarwal (2004), there are two types of relationships between brands and their consumers, which have
their respective norms of behavior: First, exchange relationships are based on the assumption that those
who provide benefits to the other party expect to receive something in return. On the contrary, in communal
relationships the motivation is altruistic. People provide benefits because they care for the other party, not
because they expect something in return. We expect that posters who have an
existing relationship with a firm and perceive the firm as useful are more likely to engage in e-NWOM
posting behavior because they see the value of maintaining the relationship with the brand and
want to help the company.
In this study, we define company usefulness as the extent to which consumers perceive a company's
product or service provides value to them. Instead of measuring intentions to help the company
as an indicator of company usefulness, we operationalize it as whether a consumer had an opportunity to
assess the value of the company. If such an opportunity motivates a consumer to cognitively
process the benefits of the firm, this will result in a positive moderating effect on e-NWOM posters, which is
proposed using a plus sign in Fig. 1. Study 1 tests the moderating role of company usefulness by using a
real company's community website where visitors are existing customers of the company. Thus, customers
who maintain a good relationship with the company and desire to help it can post e-NWOM without the fear
of going against the community norm. In other words, if a customer posts NWOM and experience the value
of a product or a service and perceive its usefulness after he or she posts, we expect that his or her
subsequent purchases will increase. H1. Company usefulness has a positive moderating effect on the
relationship between posting e-NWOM and subsequent purchases
because it amplifies a positive effect of venting and buffers a negative effect of self-prophecy.
, Attribution theory provides an explanatory framework for these recipients of e-NWOM messages.
According to this theory, causal analysis is inevitable in an individual's need to understand social events
and decide which actions to take (Keller,2007). In our context, viewers (i.e., observers) are motivated to
process e-NWOM messages in order to make judgments about the causes that trigger the creation of e-
NWOM by other consumers. Depending on how they attribute the caused whether it is the company, the
poster, or other circumstances such attributions influence subsequent actions they take toward the
company.
Laczniak, DeCarlo, and Ramaswami (2001) specified three types of information that consumers use to make
causal attributions: (1) consensus (i.e., the extent to which other consumers agree with the
negative views of the poster), (2) distinctiveness (i.e., whether the negative information is associated with a
particular brand or with other brands), (3) consistency (i.e., the extent to which a poster is
stable in his position across time and situations). Consumers blame the company when the information they
receive is high on all three dimensions, and the communicator when the dimensions are low,
concluding that the problem is unique to the complainer. Both Study 1 and 2 examine NWOM engendered
due to firm policy changes that influence all the existing customers. The contexts in both studies present
the case in which all three dimensions of attribution are considered high. It is high consensus because the
policy change impacts all customers of the company, which elicit similar negative reactions on the
community site. It is high distinctiveness since the website is exclusively for customers of the given brand.
It is high consistency because the tone of the posts was uniformly negative for those who posted multiple
times. In sum, we expect consumers to attribute the cause of e-NWOM to the company and blame its
decision to change the company policy.We also expect high consensus and consistency conditions to
create a sense of social norm (Lee, Park, & Han, 2008). Thus, viewers will conform to the social norm of the
community site and form negative attitudes toward the firm, which will negatively affect future purchase
decisions (Duan, Gu, & Whinston, 2008). Accordingly, we present a minus sign in Fig. 1 and formally
propose the following hypothesis.
H2. An e-NWOM viewer decreases his or her subsequent purchases after he or she reads e-NWOM in
high levels of consensus, distinctiveness, and consistency.
This study examines the effect of posting and viewing e-NWOM on purchase behaviors, and the
moderating role of company usefulness and company apology. A series of two studies showed that
(1) posting e-NWOM has a positive effect when posters are reminded of the firm's usefulness after engaging
in posting behavior, (2) viewing e-NWOM that consists of uniformly negative opinions decreases
subsequent purchases, and (3) a company responsed reminding customers of the value provided by the
firm and apologizing for the policy changedincreases behavioural intention among e-NWOM viewers. The
effect of posting e-NWOM is moderated by whether posters are aware of the usefulness of the brand
through point redemption. The findings suggest the importance of relationship marketing in the emergence
of e-NWOM crisis. The existing relationship between customers and the company, especially when
customers perceive the company to be useful to them, works as a positive
moderator that mitigates the negative sentiments from elaborating what they have experienced (i.e., self-
prophecy). In addition, the positive impact of posting through venting (Nyer & Gopinath,
2005) can be escalated when customers are placed in a situation where they are reminded of how the brand
creates value.
Abstract:
Marketing scholars and practitioners have long recognized that the power of electronic negative word-of-
mouth (e-NWOM) can influence brand revenues and firm performance, but most previous studies have only
examined the effect of viewing. This study is one of the initial attempts to test the effects of e-NWOM on
both posters and viewers. We also test the moderating effects of company usefulness and company
apology in a separate study. Using an observational dataset that contains NWOM viewing and posting
records and customers' purchase transactions from a real company, Study 1 finds that viewing e- NWOM
has a negative effect on subsequent purchases, whereas posting e-NWOM has a positive interaction effect
with company usefulness. Study 2 shows that a company's public apology has a positive effect on viewers,
but not posters. We conclude with the theoretical, methodological, and managerial implications of e-NWOM
and webcare research.
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