With advancing in information technology, companies communicate with consumers through various new media such as web sites, facebook, real-time chatting, and twitter. Companies utilize new media to provide information about their products and services...
With advancing in information technology, companies communicate with consumers through various new media such as web sites, facebook, real-time chatting, and twitter. Companies utilize new media to provide information about their products and services and to maintain long-term relationship with their customers. In particular, under the uncertainty and plethora of information in new media, it becomes a significant issue for marketers to foster consumers’ trust and loyalty toward their services and information provided via various new media. Hereby, we examine the effects of 1) message types (non-promotional message vs. promotional message), 2) judgement situation (holistic judgment vs. analytic judgment), and 3) the level of service failure situations (simple vs. serious failure) on the consumers’ perceptions of trust toward marketers’ messages, intention to purchase, and loyalty under different media choices (twitter vs. blog). Based on the interactivity theory, 9 hypotheses are empirically tested in three experimental settings. The results indicate that consumers’ purchase intention and loyalty are enhanced when they receive non-promotional messages compared to promotional messages, and when the message is delivered via twitter compared to via blog (Experiment 1). In addition, when consumers are involved in analytic judgment, consumers' perceived trust toward blog messages are higher than consumers’ perceived trust toward twitter messages. However, under holistic judgement situation, consumers perceived trust is higher when they read messages posted in twitter than when they read message posted in blog (Experiment 2). Lastly, under a serious service failure situation, consumers’ perceived trust toward marketers is higher when they receive the message of apology via blog than when they received via twitter. The study has important implications for marketers who are interested in offering services to their customers and managing relationship utilizing new media.
Key words : New Media, Interactivity, Trust, Thinking Style, Service failure, Twitter, Blog, Message Types, Loyalty, Purchase Intention