The Impact of Word of Mouth on Restaurant Image in Lebanon: Traditional WOM vs. Electronic WOM
Abstract
Since we are living in an era where traditional ways of communication are fading little by little and are replaced by information technology, specifically Social Media, which is consuming consumers' time and energy and not to mention consuming the resources of the organizations, we have taken this issue into account and studied the impact of word of mouth (traditional word of mouth (TWOM) vs. electric word of mouth (eWOM) on restaurants image in Lebanon. TWOM is considered to be an advice from a friend whereas eWOM is composed of personal eWOM which is online blogs or bloggers and commercial eWOM which is the restaurant website. The study was conducted by using descriptive statistics, reliability of scales, factor analysis, regression analysis, independent sample T-test and ANOVA with Post Hoc analysis. Some of our hypotheses were supported and some were not supported. The results showed that TWOM compared to personal and commercial eWOM has high levels of trustworthiness and that there is no difference in trustworthiness levels between personal eWOM and commercial eWOM. The results also showed that TWOM compared to personal eWOM has high levels of expertness; commercial eWOM compared to personal eWOM has high levels of expertness and that there is no difference in the level of expertness between TWOM and commercial eWOM. As for the impact of WOM on image (cognitive and affective), we have explored that cognitive image differs across the three different types of WOM, whereas affective image does not differ. Moreover by conducting regression analysis for each WOM source alone we have finally noticed that trustworthiness and expertness of the source impacts the affective image but does not impact the cognitive image.
Description
Keywords
Citation
Joulfayan, S. A. (2018). The Impact of Word of Mouth on Restaurant Image in Lebanon: Traditional WOM vs. Electronic WOM (MBA thesis, Haigazian University)