TY - JOUR
T1 - What happens in Vegas stays on trip advisor? A theory and technique to understand narrativity in consumer reviews
AU - Van Laer, Tom
AU - Edson Escalas, Jennifer
AU - Ludwig, Stephan
AU - Van Den Hende, Ellis A.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Journal of Consumer Research, Inc. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected].
PY - 2019/8
Y1 - 2019/8
N2 - Many consumers base their purchase decisions on online consumer reviews. An overlooked feature of these texts is their narrativity: the extent to which they tell a story. The authors construct a new theory of narrativity to link the narrative content and discourse of consumer reviews to consumer behavior. They also develop from scratch a computerized technique that reliably determines the degree of narrativity of 190,461 verbatim, online consumer reviews and validate the automated text analysis with two controlled experiments. More transporting (i.e., engaging) and persuasive reviews have better-developed characters and events as well as more emotionally changing genres and dramatic event orders. This interdisciplinary, multimethod research should help future researchers (1) predict how narrativity affects consumers' narrative transportation and persuasion, (2) measure the narrativity of large digital corpora of textual data, and (3) understand how this important linguistic feature varies along a continuum.
AB - Many consumers base their purchase decisions on online consumer reviews. An overlooked feature of these texts is their narrativity: the extent to which they tell a story. The authors construct a new theory of narrativity to link the narrative content and discourse of consumer reviews to consumer behavior. They also develop from scratch a computerized technique that reliably determines the degree of narrativity of 190,461 verbatim, online consumer reviews and validate the automated text analysis with two controlled experiments. More transporting (i.e., engaging) and persuasive reviews have better-developed characters and events as well as more emotionally changing genres and dramatic event orders. This interdisciplinary, multimethod research should help future researchers (1) predict how narrativity affects consumers' narrative transportation and persuasion, (2) measure the narrativity of large digital corpora of textual data, and (3) understand how this important linguistic feature varies along a continuum.
KW - automated text analysis
KW - computational linguistics
KW - consumer reviews
KW - narrative persuasion
KW - narrative transportation
KW - storytelling
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85083803034&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1093/jcr/ucy067
DO - 10.1093/jcr/ucy067
M3 - Review Article
AN - SCOPUS:85083803034
SN - 0093-5301
VL - 46
SP - 267
EP - 285
JO - Journal of Consumer Research
JF - Journal of Consumer Research
IS - 2
ER -