An empirical investigation of gist helpfulness in online reviews

Abstract

The online-purchase trends suggest that consumers' online reviews have become very important for customers and the sellers in purchase decisions and product sales respectively. Although the significance of online reviews has been examined, there are research gaps in studies on how to make title of online reviews helpful. The paper explores the traits that influence the formation of title of online reviews. The study proposes gist helpfulness for the title of online reviews adopting elements such as online recommendation, online reviewer, and online review timeline, online review indicator. Our analysis of data from survey of 528 customers shows that daily use of internet positively influences gist helpfulness. The analysis was conducted through binary logistic regression. It is found that review depth and online reading experience have significance over gist helpfulness. The approach in this study is empirical where it attempts to improvise selection of reading reviews based on titles. The scope of the study is as such that it can be adopted by online companies to upgrade the current online review system and enrich customer experience to maintain relationship with their users. Besides, this paper aims to develop a normative model considering important strategic issues to develop an insight related to consumer reviews. 1. Introduction Online customer reviews have endeavored influence on customers' purchase decisions when shopping online and has given modern emphasis to the concept of word-of-mouth. Online reviews play significant role in making certain degree of construct, supported by the level of cognizance and technical orientation of the consumer in a given interactive digital environment. The enormous quantity, heterogeneity and receptiveness of online reviews have contributed to their appeal and growing popularity. Voluminous information is available regarding products reviews online and reading all the reviews is laborious and time consuming for customers. Thus, most customers choose to read reviews selectively. The online sellers invite users of their products to post personal product evaluations on the sellers' and it helps them correct their promotional strategy accordingly. According to the theory of selective attention, people react to messages selectively because individual possess finite information processing capacity (Treisman, 1969). Similarly, people pay selective attention to online reviews. People look for instantaneous cues that enable them to decide whether to read a review or not. One such indicator is the title of online reviews. Titles of online reviews grab the attention of customers. Salehan and Kim (2016) found reviews receive more readerships with titles having higher levels of positive sentiment whereas length of the title is negatively related to the readership. Each review has a title and body text. However, despite prior investigations related review body text in online reviews we find the title of online reviews component is mostly unexplored in this domain.