Evolution, Rapid Growth & Future of Research on Electronic Word of Mouth (eWOM): A Scientific Review

Abstract

With the advent of new information & communication technologies (ICT) and its ever growing application in connecting people, online social media have become one of the main platforms for people to people interaction and this has obvious impact on formulation of marketing strategy for better understanding consumer behaviour through this new and emerging media. Research in this emerging area is still in its infancy and number of research papers developed is still small considering the importance of this area of research. Research on social media, social networking sites and eWOM has slowly started to gain momentum in the last couple of years due to overwhelming increase in the growth of number of consumers engagement in social media and also number of firms gearing up for choosing social media as preferred platform for launching promotional campaign. For the past couple of years, the researchers across the globe are engaged in developing concepts & models regarding consumers intention to engage themselves in eWOM, consumers motivation behind eWOM transmission and the impact of social media on consumers decision making process. At this point of time, when research on social media & eWOM is in a transition period, a scientific review of the existing literature on this area is of high importance. Evaluation and discussion on prior research can help to identify the linkages among the existing concepts and theories as well as it can help to diagnose the gaps in the literature. Convergence of concepts through extensive review of literature can enable the future researchers to identify potential areas of research. This paper is such an effort to enable future researchers quickly disseminate the recently developed concepts and newly found results which are of significant importance from the point of view of research on measuring various impacts of eWOM, social media and social networking sites on consumer behaviour.

Keywords: Word of Mouth (WOM), Electronic Word of Mouth (eWOM), Social Media, Social Networking Sites (SNSs), Consumer Behaviour

JEL Classification: A00, A10, B30, M00, M10, M30, M31, M37, M39, Z00