The perceived usefulness of blog postings: An extension of the expectancy-disconfirmation paradigm

Abstract

Today millions of consumers connect with one another on travel blogs as both contributors and users. Contributors share detailed narratives of their recent experience with specific hotels/resorts leading to recommendations, while users acquire information from them to base their purchase decisions on. Hotel managers carefully monitor what previous guests say in the evaluations assuming that negative evaluations will deter future customers. Framed in the expectancy-disconfirmation paradigm, this study focused on clarifying the impact consumers who post on travel blogs have on blog users by analyzing user reactions to 134 travel matched blog recommendations. Findings demonstrate that as expected a higher percentage of blog users find multiple evaluations that are congruent with one another (both negative and positive) helpful, and that negative postings were not necessarily bad if followed by a positive counter reaction. Furthermore, the paper addresses the issue of deception attempting to determine if it exists and what effect it has on the web 2.0 medium. Implications for managers and researchers are discussed.

Introduction

The consumer satisfaction literature is extensive, purporting several theoretical models to describe the evaluative processes that lead to satisfaction. Howard and Sheth (1969) defined satisfaction as the degree of congruence between a consumer’s aspirations and perceived experiences. Later Rust and Oliver (1994) proposed the expectancy-disconfirmation model as a means to describe the process. Soon after, the expectancy-disconfirmation paradigm (EDP) emerged as the most frequently cited framework used by tourism researchers (Erevelles and Lockshin, 1991, Oh and Parks, 1997, Weber, 1997, Yüksel and Yüksel, 2001). EDP implies that customers purchase products or services with pre-purchase expectations about their anticipated performance (Reisinger and Waryszak, 1996, Tribe and Snaith, 1998). The expectation level then becomes a standard against which the product’s performance is ultimately judged. That is, once the product or service has been consumed, each consumer will compare outcomes against expectations to make a judgment regarding his satisfaction (Woodruff & Gardial, 1996).

Hence there are three possible outcomes of the consumer evaluative process. If the outcome matches the expectations, congruence occurs; if expectations are exceeded, positive incongruence occurs. Conversely, if performance is lower than expected, negative incongruence occurs (Erevelles and Leavitt, 1992, Oliver, 1980). In other words, the consumer, according to EDP, may find the product/service worse than expected (negative disconfirmation), better than expected (positive disconfirmation), or as expected (confirmation).

In order to reduce information asymmetries in the tourism industry, consumers acquire information from multiple sources (Crotts, 1999). The principle of social validation (Cialdini & Goldstein, 2002) asserts that “we seek the advice from others on how to think, feel and behave, particularly when we are in a state of uncertainty” (p. 47). In consumer behavior and tourism research, we often construe this as advice from friends and relatives. Today, given the emergence of the web 2.0 medium, strangers are providing recommendations to one another which are often accepted as being as reliable and trustworthy as traditional word-of-mouth sources (Gunter et al., 2009, Mack et al., 2008, Pan et al., 2007). Gretzel, Yoo, and Purifoy (2007) reported that the most popular online activities carried out during the trip planning phase using tripadvisor.com were looking at other tourists’ comments and materials and reading travel-related blogs.

There have already been several studies examining blogs as an information source. Carson (2008), for example, examined different sources of consumer generated web content about travel to Australia’s Northern Territory and evaluated the authorship and readership as well as the nature of the content itself. Another paper by Schmallegger and Carson (2008) examined how web 2.0 applications, and specifically the increasing number of travel blogs, might influence the key functions of new media such as promotion, product distribution, communication, management and research. Douglas and Mills (2006) identified the brand images communicated by bloggers who had visited the Middle East and North Africa. Pan et al. (2007) carried out a study where they analyzed visitor opinions posted on leading travel blog sites via semantic network analysis to gain an understanding of the destination experience being manifested. Wenger (2008) revealed some insights into the use of blogs about travel to Austria for travel recommendations (consumer to consumer) and market research (by destinations and tourism operators) using blogs posted at www.travelblog.org as a sample. Wenger analyzed the content of blog entries to identify positive and negative perceptions of Austria as a tourism destination, and compared these with other research into Austria’s destination image. The Keng and Ting (2009) study is based on the interactivity and perceived similarities between blog readers and others, and incorporates the concept of customer experiential value of blog users using structural equation modeling (SEM). The purpose of this study is to both extend and test the EDP with the purpose of clarifying the impact consumers who post on travel blogs have on blog users.

Although EDP is, as a rule, focused on the expectations of an individual, the consumer to consumer nature of travel blogs serves a similar purpose where the evaluations of one customer can influence the expectations of many others. “Millions of people have joined travel blog websites to share their travel experiences online, and blogging has become an aspect of the tourist production and consumption process” (Bosangit, McCabe, & Hibbert, 2009, p. 61). This web 2.0 medium has emerged as a fundamental means in which consumers acquire pre-purchase information (Peterson & Merino, 2003). Blogs are rich narratives that contain details of experiences from multiple guests and provide a great deal of useful information to the blog reader (Carson, 2008, Schmallegger and Carson, 2008) and researchers alike (Crotts et al., 2009, Pan et al., 2007). In certain cases, bloggers may support one another in offering a negative, positive, or neutral critique of a property or business. In this case, the multiple evaluations are relatively congruent with one another. In another case, there may be discrepancy where the posting of one review is not confirmed by the subsequent blog poster. According to EDP, the discrepancies can be categorized as either positive or negative disconfirmation. It is these three categories of congruent or incongruent subsequent impact on blog users that is the focus of this study.

The following propositions will be tested:

The EDP predicts that customers will be satisfied when their initial expectations are met (Iacobucci et al., 1994, Swan and Trawick, 1980, Yüksel and Yüksel, 2001). These matched pairs of blog postings that are congruent in their recommendations will confirm a stable standard which blog users should find useful in their pre-purchase search. In other words, blog users will find these congruent recommendations useful as a standard or benchmark on which to base future pre-purchase expectations. Again, the principle of social validation asserts that stable congruence between reviewers will provide strong assurances to consumers which they ultimately will find useful in states of uncertainty.

Proposition 1

Blog users will find blog postings that are congruent in their recommendations (congruence) useful.

According to the current logic of EDP and social validation, blog users will receive a weaker standard when the blog postings are incongruent with one another (Yüksel & Yüksel, 2001). More specifically, where a follow up blog posting counters or does not confirm the evaluation of the initial blog positing, blog users will not have a congruent standard or benchmark to base their expectations on. However, we contend that users will react differently to circumstances involving positive incongruence as opposed to negative incongruence. Our position rests on the contention of 18th century French philosopher La Rochefoucauld (1893, cited in Cialdini & Goldstein, 2002, p. 50) who wrote “We only confess our little faults to persuade people that we have no big one.” In sales and marketing we find companies who intentionally mention their product’s shortcomings in the belief it makes them appear more honest and trustworthy in their subsequent claims that they excel in all other respects. “Avis: We are number two but we try harder” is one such marketing slogan. There is some research evidence that supports this prediction. People who compensate for the antagonistic behavior of others with positive messages have been shown to have more persuasive success than people who are congruent or negatively incongruent (Floyd, 1999). Framed in Interaction Adaptation Theory, people who counter the negative behavior of others with positive information often garner more likeability and rapport from those they wish to influence. Thus, in the case of positive incongruence between two bloggers, the first blogger states the hotels shortcomings followed by a second blogger who challenges or counters the assertions of the first with a positive review. This communication will be deemed by users as more attractive and influential compared to negative incongruence.

Proposition 2

Blog users will find information which reverse the initial negative review with a positive review (positive incongruence) more useful.

Conversely, communication that is predicted to be the least effective will be negatively incongruent to the initial positive behavior (Floyd, 1999). In the case of a blog posting countering the evaluation of the initial positive blog in a negative way (negative incongruence), the behavior will have a dampening effect on the messages’ attractiveness to the blog user.

Proposition 3

Blog users will evaluate blog postings that reverse the initial positive review with a negative one (negative incongruence) as less useful.

The above propositions rest on the assumption that discrepancies between communications as to a product’s performance will evoke psychological processes in the consumers that will ultimately influence their attraction towards and acceptance of the communication (Floyd, 1999, Yüksel and Yüksel, 2001). The practical implications rest on the reactions managers have to customer evaluations of their firms on travel blogs. Ideally, all managers desire to see blog postings that are all positive and that help them acquire insights into the key service factors valued by the customer (Yüksel & Yüksel, 2001). However, this is difficult to achieve given that some customers are more difficult-to-please than others, especially if there are customers who are ‘difficult-to-please at all’ (Spreng & Dixon, 1992). Moreover, the intangible and highly variable nature of the guest experience makes delivering at the same level of quality and reliability difficult even in the best of organizations.

Lastly, this study addresses a related issue involving EDP and the web 2.0 medium; the degree to which deception exists and its subsequent influence on blog users. Deception is defined as the deliberate attempt by one party to create a belief in others the communicator knows is untrue (Burgoon, Blair, Qin, & Nunamaker, 2003). Today it is reasonable to assume that nearly all hotel managers carefully follow what consumers say about their product on the leading travel blogs given their influence on future consumers. It is also plausible that some hotel managers may deliberately attempt to counter a negative but truthful evaluation of a recent guest with a deceptive positive one that they post in an attempt to counter the negative publicity. It is also not far fetched to assume that a dubious manager may attempt to malign one’s competition by posting a negative evaluation as a recent guest. Assuming the above is plausible, the questions evoked are to what degree does deception occur in travel blogs and to what degree do such occurrences corrupt the overall EDP paradigm outlined in Proposition 1, Proposition 2, Proposition 3 of this study? These questions, due to their exploratory nature, do not lend themselves to formal hypotheses and will be tested in their null forms.