Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Hospitality Management / Junehee Kwon / With the advancement of the Internet and information technology, consumers have access to a massive amount of information before purchase. In the hospitality industry, consumers frequently search online information to make decisions. However, there has been limited hospitality research exploring the actual information search behaviors in the online setting. The purpose of this research was to assess the actual information search behaviors of consumers when choosing restaurants through consumer review websites. To accomplish the purpose, three mixed-methods were used including eye-tracking experiments (Phase I), qualitative, retrospective think-aloud (RTA) interviews (Phase II), and a scenario-based survey (Phase III). In the eye-tracking experiments, 30 participants were recruited and instructed to conduct restaurant search tasks. Variables included fixation duration, fixation count, and visit count, indicating how long and how often consumers’ attention had been attracted to certain information areas. The eye-tracking data was also visualized through heat maps and gaze plots. Following eye-tracking experiments, RTA interviews were conducted to investigate the underlying thinking process of consumers. A playback of the recorded eye-tracking video was presented to each participant while participants verbalized their thinking process and reasoning of information search behaviors. The interviews were recorded, transcribed, and analyzed through grounded-theory model to identify important information elements. To overcome the limited generalizability of the eye-tracking experiments and interviews, a scenario-based survey was created, and seven hypotheses were developed to evaluate impacts of online reviews, images, and advertisements on consumers’ interests and restaurant visit intentions based on the results of Phases I and II. Restaurant selection scenarios were provided to the participants to look through screenshots of webpages in order to mimic the online environment. The online survey company Amazon MTurk was used for data collection. A total of 406 usable survey responses were collected and analyzed using descriptive statistics, one-sample Chi-square tests, and visualized heat maps. Eye-tracking experiment results revealed that images, consumer reviews, and filter functions were the top information areas to which consumers paid considerable attention. Advertisements in Yelp also received much attention from participants, but during RTA interviews, advertisements were found to be less impactful for consumers’ decision-making than the number of reviews, images with food items, and consumer reviews. Five out of seven hypotheses in Phase III were supported, indicating that it was mostly consistent with findings of the eye-tracking experiments and interviews (Phase I and II). Specifically, consumers’ interests and intentions to visit restaurants were greater for restaurants with a higher number of reviews, food images, and without advertisements. Consumers also were more interested in extremely rated reviews and preferred evenly-distributed image groups. This study contributes to the existing hospitality literature related to consumer behavior with the utilization of the innovative, combined methods of eye-tracking technology, RTA interviews, and scenario-based survey. This approach allowed the researcher to obtain a holistic view of actual consumer behavior, thinking process accompanying the behavior as well as the verification with large sample. Consumer review websites and restaurateurs were provided with specific recommendations to enhance the online user experience and improve customer satisfaction, respectively.

Several studies have examined the use of emoji and emoticons in computer mediated communication among peers and colleges but there is yet academic research on the impact of businesses using these paralinguistic cues when responding to online consumer reviews. This research is examining the influence these paralinguistic cues have on the consumers perception of the companies quality of the response to an online consumer review, brand relationship, purchase intent. Using an online survey, participants are asked to answer general questions about the brand, the quality of the response, brand relationship, and purchase intent after seeing a random condition of both a low and high involvement product. Result support previous eWOM research as valence of the review had the largest impact on the consumers perception of the companies quality of the response to an online consumer review, brand relationship, purchase intent with an interesting finding where in most cases the addition of an emoji in positive valence message attributes to the strongest findings. With the increase in emoji usage in marketing and advertising, it is important that business are utilizing these tools in effective means otherwise the use of these paralinguistic cues could negatively impact the companies quality of the response to an online consumer review, brand relationship, purchase intent.

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Title:  The effects of online third-party opinions toward Consumer Purchasing Decision on cosmetics products in Thai market Seminar date: June 4th , 2012 Course: Master thesis in International marketing, 15 credits Purpose: The overall purpose of this research is to explain the understanding of the effects of online third-party opinions toward consumer purchasing decision process on cosmetics products in Thai market. This includes the investigation of effective used of online third-party opinions with regards to source credibility and product involvement, specifically toward cosmetics products. Theoretical framework: The theoretical framework of this research is based on literature concerning online third party opinion, consumer decision journey (CDJ), product involvement and source credibility. Methodology: Both quantitative and qualitative method was applied. And thus a questionnaire with 147 respondents on Thai market and two interviews of expert marketers were conducted. The respondents for questionnaire are Thai women with specific age range and criteria. Conclusion: The online third-party opinion plays the important role in nowadays in the marketing perspective. And it does affect the consumer purchasing decision process both pre-purchase and post-purchase stage. However, it mostly affects in Consider and Evaluation Stage. With regards to the product involvement and source credibility applying to cosmetics products, these two variables affect to the use of online third-party opinion. Online third-party opinion works best with high involvement product. However, low involvement product also be considered as suitable to use with online third-party opinion. For source credibility, both online expert and consumer reviews perform better when using with high involvement product comparing with low involvement one.

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