Understanding the Role of Textual Paralanguage in Electronic Word of Mouth

Abstract

Electronic word of mouth (eWOM) refers to online communication about products and brands among consumers. eWOM influences the consumer decision-making process and subsequently affects sales. Currently, consumers are sharing eWOM enriched with textual paralanguage (TPL). TPL, which includes emojis, emoticons, stickers, various punctuations, and demarcations, represents expressions of non-verbal communication in writing. Despite previously being ignored by scholars, TPL adds substantial meaning to eWOM. Therefore, this dissertation, consisting of three independent articles, focuses on eWOM written with TPL. Article 1 is a systematic literature review of eWOM written with TPL. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive review of 70 academic publications on eWOM with TPL and address three research questions (RQs). Our findings indicate that senders of eWOM use TPL to express discreet emotions with accurate intensity and to maintain social ties (RQ1). We also illustrate how sentiment analysis tools apply different techniques to determine the sentiment of TPL in eWOM messages (RQ1). We build a conceptual model outlining five influence mechanisms and nine moderators of how eWOM with TPL influences its receivers (RQ3). Finally, we provide several propositions for future research. Articles 2 and 3 are empirical studies that investigate how eWOM with TPL influences its senders and receivers, respectively. Both articles focus on the media richness of eWOM formats as an explanatory variable and use TPL to manipulate the media richness of eWOM. Media richness refers to the extent to which a medium can convey a variety of information. Two dimensions of media richness are language variety (the extent to which a medium can incorporate various symbols) and multiple cues (the extent to which a medium can incorporate various forms of non-verbal communication). We argue that eWOM with text and TPL, compared to eWOM with only text, is higher in language variety and multiple cues, resulting in higher media richness. iv Article 2 investigates the consequences of engaging in eWOM with varying media-rich formats (eWOM with only text vs. eWOM with text and TPL) on the sender’s self-brand connection (SBC). Drawing upon the consumer brand engagement (CBE) framework, we argue that when senders share eWOM with richer media formats, they acquire higher cognitive CBE and content engagement, leading to higher SBC. We conducted three experiments. Across these studies, we find that the language variety of media richness leads to cognitive CBE and content engagement, which in turn leads to higher SBC. Article 3 examines how the media richness of eWOM (eWOM with only text vs. eWOM with text and TPL) influences its receivers. The theoretical framework suggests that the media richness of eWOM affects receivers’ purchase intentions through two parallel mediators: by influencing vivid mental imagery of the product experience and by influencing the perceived warmth of the reviewers. Two experiments show that language variety leads to vivid mental imagery and multiple cues lead to the perceived warmth of reviewers, both of which influence receivers’ purchase intentions parallelly. This dissertation enriches the eWOM literature by providing a better understanding of how eWOM with TPL influences its senders and receivers. We also discuss future research directions on this topic. Our results suggest that managers should encourage consumers to use TPL in their eWOM. Keywords: electronic word of mouth, textual paralanguage, media richness, language variety, multiple cues