Consumer Product Evaluation Updating: The Impact of Online and Interpersonal Social Influence on Evaluation Certainty

With the ever growing reliance on the Internet as a critical source of consumer information, there have been calls to continue to explore the impact of digital information on consumer choice and decision-making. The research fulfills the call in part by investigating the roles of online social influence (OSI) and interpersonal social influence (ISI) on consumer product-related attitudes and evaluations. The authors propose that, when consumers seek information regarding products, they form an initial product-related attitude (i.e. evaluation) of the object, and subsequently update or validate this evaluation as more information is received from sources of social influence. More specifically, it is suggested that the certainty with which they hold this product evaluation changes based on the match between existing product attitudes and incoming information. We review the existing literature on attitude certainty and online and interpersonal influence to present three hypotheses regarding the proposed process of product evaluation updating. This research provides many potential contributions to the retail marketing and consumer behavior literature. First, this work begins to integrate consumer influence from an online setting with interpersonal influence to determine the impact of such influence on product-related attitudes. By suggesting that these forms of influence interact to impact the certainty of product-related attitudes, the current research adds depth to existing literature regarding the antecedents and consequences of attitude certainty. We further explore the power of social influence in its various mediums and how this influence affects the intention and behavior of consumers in an online retail setting. The current research has implications for the manner in which online retailers present their product information and connect consumers through user reviews of products by suggesting that higher quality and more personalized information from these various sources will impact the certainty with which product evaluations are held.