개인요인과 제품요인 관여도의 구전효과에 대한 차별적인 영향

The Word-Of-Mouth (WOM) communication has substantial influence on a consumer’s productevaluation and purchase decision. There are the two main theoretical perspectives that explainthe role of the consumer involvement that affects the success or failure of a persuasive attempt. One is the dual-process models and the other one is the social judgement theory. The dual-process models explain that high-involvement individuals evaluate the merits of themessage and they are persuaded if the arguments are strong enough to generate favorablethoughts about the product. According to the dual-process models, the WOM effect is strongerto high-involvement individuals than to low-involvement individuals because it is very strongargument which comes from previous buyers. Alternatively, in social judgement theory, thedegree of involvement is posited to have a main effect on attitude change such that the moreinvolved a person is with an issue, the more that the person will resist attitude change. In otherwords, the WOM effect is stronger to low-involvement individuals than to high-involvementindividuals in perspective of the social judgement theory. A consumer’s overall involvement is affected by ‘product-involvement’ and ‘individualinvolvement’. The ‘individual-involvement’ represents the consumer involvement depending onconsumers' characteristics when consumers evaluate a product. In contrast, the ‘productinvolvement’represents the consumer involvement depending on product characteristics whenconsumers evaluate multiple products. This paper discomposes the overall involvement into‘individual-involvement’ and ‘product-involvement’, and notes that the ego-involvement isclosely related to characteristics of products, and then proposes that the WOM effect increases as the ‘individual-involvement’ increases and it decreases as the ‘product-involvement’ increases. One hundred fourteen university students (male=64 and female=50) participated in theempirical study. They were randomly assigned to one of two conditions (control condition vs. experiment condition). The respondents who were assigned to the experiment group were askedto evaluate the four products where their friends are persuading to them buy the products, incontrast, the respondents who were assigned to the control group were asked to evaluate theproducts without their friends' persuasions. Consequently, they were asked to report theirwillingness to purchase the four products. The willingness was ranked on the 5-point scale,with 1 indicating a low willingness and 5 indicating a high willingness to purchase, and theconsumer involvement were evaluated on the 5-point scale, with 1 indicating a low involvementand 5 indicating a high involvement. Levene's t-tests and ANOVA analyses showed that respondents are likely to be persuaded bythe WOM when the ‘individual-involvement’ is relatively high, whereas they are likely to bepersuaded by the WOM when the ‘product-involvement’ is relatively low. Johnson and Eagly(1989) attempt to reconcile the contradictory predictions by the dual-process models and thesocial judgement theory for the effect of consumer involvement. They address that high valuerelatedinvolvement consumers were less persuaded than low value-related involvement consumers,whereas high outcome-related involvement consumers were more persuaded than low outcomerelatedconsumers. In the final section, this paper discusses the possible relationships betweentheir study and the results of this study, and proposes the future research direction.