ELECTRONIC WORD-OF-MOUTH, INTERPERSONAL RELATIONSHIP, AND BRAND EVALUATION IN A CLOSED VIRTUAL GROUP OF FRIENDS
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Every day, billions of messages about news, rumours, and experiences are shared by consumers through different kinds of social network medias (Berger, 2014). These shared messages, so called word-of-mouth (WOM), have crucial influence on the success of products and services (Dubois, Bonezzi, & De Angelis, 2016). WOM is a kind of interpersonal communication about products and services between consumers. Thus, it can be significantly influenced by interpersonal relationships. We conducted three experiments to investigate the effects of interpersonal relationships on brand evaluation. In three experiments, we examined how interpersonal relationship affects consumers’ evaluation of brands when they receive a eWOM message in the setting of closed virtual group of friends. The results make several contributions. First, we provide a framework to understand how interpersonal relationships affect the effects of eWOM in a closed virtual group of friends. Second, the effects of interpersonal relationship can be moderated by different situation of agreements, which extends the researches on eWOM. Third, the results reveal the reasons why different dimension of interpersonal relationship can play different role in the relationship between eWOM and brand evaluation.