Perceived Helpfulness of Online Consumer Reviews: The Role of Message Content and Style

The rise of online reviews written by consumers makes possible an examination of how the content and style of these word-of-mouth messages contribute to their helpfulness. In this study, consumers are asked to judge the value of real online consumer reviews to their simulated shopping activities. The results suggest the benefits of moderate review length and of positive, but not negative, product evaluative statements. Non-evaluative product information and information about the reviewer were also found to be associated with review helpfulness. Stylistic elements that may impair clarity (such as spelling and grammatical errors) were associated with less valuable reviews, and elements that may make a review more entertaining (such as expressive slang and humor) were associated with more valuable reviews. These findings point to factors beyond product information that may affect the perceived helpfulness of an online consumer review. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Word-of-mouth (WOM) communication—the exchange of information about goods and services among consumers— has long been recognized as a valued and influential source of consumer information (e.g., Whyte, 1954). The Internet has dramatically increased WOM communication, particularly in the form of consumer reviews on retailing websites. As of 2004, it was estimated that there were over 10 million consumer reviews on Amazon.com alone (Harmon, 2004). The growth in online consumer reviews has been motivated by consumer interest in such reviews (Kumar and Benbasat, 2006) and has benefitted online retailers with increased customer loyalty and lower costs, such as for returned products (Voight, 2007). It has been proposed that consumers who post reviews serve as “sales assistants” for online retailers (Chen and Xie, 2008), who provide other consumers with useful information, and who contribute to other consumers’ satisfaction with the shopping experience. The goal of the study reported here was to better understand the factors that make online reviews appealing to consumers. Although there is recent research on the effects of consumer reviews on product sales (e.g., Godes and Mazylin, 2004; Chevalier and Mayzlin, 2006, Liu, 2006; Forman et al., 2008; Zhu and Zhang, 2010), we focus on the characteristics of online reviews that shoppers find helpful and of value. Although there is older research on “source effects” (e.g., Hovland and Weiss, 1951; McGuire, 1969; Brown and Reingen, 1987; Wilson and Sherrell, 1993), we take advantage of the fact that this modern consumer WOM is expressed in written form and look at the wording of consumer reviews rather than their source. We divide wording factors into two categories, content and style. Greater understanding of these factors can help guide managers of retail websites toward encouraging reviews that their patrons will find more useful and may also shed some light on the nature of the long-acknowledged power of WOM communication. CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK The distinction between the content and the style of a message is one that is well established in the field of communication research (e.g., Norton, 1978). The content-versus-style distinction has been used in studying the effectiveness of personal selling communications (Williams and Spiro, 1985; Dion and Notarantonio, 1992), in communications regarding product information (Moon, 2002), and in understanding how people use electronic communications such as email (Colley and Todd, 2002). For the purposes of the present study, we define the content of an online review as the information it provides. Its style, by contrast, involves the choice of words the reviewer uses to express this information.