As one of the biggest service-oriented industries worldwide, the hotel industry significantly contributes to environmental degradation in several ways. Service marketers, consumers, and policy makers are increasingly aware of the damage that excessive natural resources depletion in the guise of water and energy consumption and CO2 emissions by hotels might bring about to the planet. As a result of the growing global concern about climate change, there has been an increase in consumer demand for environmentally-responsible hospitality options. One such option is green hotels, which are environmentally-conscious hospitality properties that are gaining popularity worldwide at a rapid pace. Consumers who prioritize eco-friendliness are willing to pay a premium for green hotels. However, unlike tangible products, services such as hotel experiences are subjective, emotional, and therefore, difficult to evaluate before actual usage. One of the prominent ways in which consumers assess green hotels’ credibility is through user generated content in the form of reviews.

Consumers have an increasingly active role in the marketing cycle, using social media channels to create, distribute, and consume digital content. In this context, this paper investigates the impact of user- and marketer-generated content on consumer purchase intentions and the approach to designing an effective social media marketing platform. Referencing a literature review of social media marketing and consumer purchase intentions, a case study of the social media-marketing platform, 0.8L, was undertaken using both qualitative and quantitative results through content analysis and a participatory survey. First, about 450 consumer reviews for ten sunscreen products posted on the 0.8L platform were compared with products’ marketer-generated content. Next, 55 subjects participated in a survey regarding purchase intentions toward moisturizing creams on the 0.8L platform. The results indicated that user-generated content (i.e., texts and photos) provided more personal experiences of the product usage process, whereas marketers focused on distinctive product photos and features. Moreover, customer reviews (particularly high volume and narrative format) had more impact on purchase decisions than marketer information in the online cosmetics market. Real users’ honest reviews (both positive and negative) were found to aid companies’ prompt and straightforward assessment of newly released products. In addition to the importance of customer-driven marketing practices, distinctive user experience design features of a competitive social media-marketing platform are identified to facilitate the creation and sharing of sincere customer reviews that resonate with potential buyers.

Marketing communication has undergone significant transformation in recent years. Influencers, who generate content on social networking sites (SNSs), have had a dramatic impact on consumers’ purchase decisions. Brands and marketers are therefore the most effective and powerful marketing tools. Social media influencers, so-called “YouTubers,” have become online opinion leaders by creating and posting content on social media, in contrast to celebrities who are well-known via traditional media in general. Previous studies regarding influencers have focused on the factors that contribute to the effectiveness of influencer marketing across various contexts or person-related factors. However, previous studies have not only elicited mixed findings concerning the effects of influencer marketing, but also reveal a lack of basic understanding of the mechanisms by which video content and influencers themselves impact consumer, particularly in the high-end product industry. Present-day social media influencers are not only information providers but also friendly communicators rather than inaccessible celebrities. Favorable attitudes towards influencers may play a crucial role in consumer behavior when purchasing high-end products in which have high prices and uncertainties. While some studies include the construct of the perception of influencers in their models, there is a lack of research on the effect of influencers and video content. Thus, we expect our empirical research to provide a comprehensive understanding of the nature of social contagion, which is highlighted by social media influencers.

Responsible customers are becoming increasingly important and the influence of online user-generated content on consumer behavior has been extensively recognized. As a result of these two trends, social media sites are adopting new initiatives on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). In the context of tourism destinations, this paper analyses the effects of online comments made by visitors to two mountain resorts about three CSR dimensions: environmental (ENV), sociocultural (SOC) and economic (ECO). Our aim is to analyze the consistency of the effects of eWOM about a single CSR dimension (ENV, SOC, ECO), two CSR dimensions (ENV+ECO, ENV+SOC, ECO+SOC) or three CSR dimensions (ENV+ECO+SOC), in the impact of CSR dimensions on information adoption. Information adoption refers to eWOM perceived usefulness (PU) and perceived influence (PI). PU refers to what extent the information in the eWOM is useful and, in turn, tourists are more likely to adopt it. PI means to what extent consumers’ perceptions of eWOM affects decision-making processes. From an information processing point of view, it is important to analyze whether individuals maintain consistency in their preference for CSR dimensions. Transitivity has been used to measure consistency in product, so it could be applied to measure the consistency of the preference for CSR dimensions, presented singly or combined, on social media sites. Transitivity implies that consumers have a welldefined hierarchy of influence. If there is transitivity, it is expected that, given a set of CSR stimuli, its influence on PU and PI will be consistent. Thus, if the influence of dimension D1 is greater than that of dimension D2 and this, in turn, has greater influence than dimension D3, then D1 must have greater influence than D3. Consequently, we propose the following hypotheses: H1: The hierarchy of influence of online comments on (a) PU and on (b) PI is the same if the comment is about a single CSR dimension or two CSR dimensions. H2: The hierarchy of influence of online comments on (a) PU and on (b) PI is the same if the comment is about a single CSR dimension or three CSR dimensions. H3: The hierarchy of influence of online comments on (a) PU and on (b) PI is the same if the comments are about two CSR dimensions or three CSR dimensions. A within-subjects and between-subjects experiment was carried out to a sample of 612 tourists from Argentina and Spain. Participants were exposed to one of seven scenarios linked to a mountain tourism destination. Each scenario contained one, two or three online reviews related to CSR dimensions. The online comments resembled a typical TripAdvisor layout and were embedded in an online survey, which also contained measures of PU and PI. Our findings suggest that, of the reviews, environmental are the most useful and influential, followed by sociocultural. This hierarchical pattern is consistent when tourists are exposed to online comments about two or more dimensions, but not when comparisons are done between individual dimensions. Our findings suggest that consistency of the consumer's preference for CSR dimensions should be managed in analyzing multiple stimuli on social media sites.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how social media and user-generated content (UGC) foster consumer engagement through the development of a good city image. Special emphasis is placed on the attitudes of potential visitors, how these attitudes affect a city’s image, and the perceived social distance between users and the authors of social media content. The study adopts a 2 x 2 experimental design in which high/low green image and high/low social distance are examined. The results suggest that a green city image has a significant effect on potential visitors’ attitude towards cities. Moreover, this study found that the effects of social media content varies according to the perceived social distance between the author of the post and potential visitors.

Customers’ final purchase decisions for electronic products are understandably influenced by previous experiences, marketing messages such as price and promotion, and opinions from other consumers (Simonson and Rosen 2014). In particular, millions of product reviews are posted daily on online review boards or social media represent aggregate consumer preference data (Decker and Trusov 2010). Past studies analyzing online reviews or word-of-mouth (WOM) have focused more on the quantitative dimension of volume of WOM (or “how much people say”), but less on qualitative dimension of valence of WOM (or “what people say”) (Gopinath, Thomas, and Krishnamurthi 2014). However, recent studies have analyzed disaggregate-level UGC by performing text mining in addition to a general analysis of volume and valence of OUGC. Onishi and Manchanda (2012) investigate the relationship between movie sales and both TV advertising and blogs. Although the authors find that the volume and the valence of OUGC (i.e., blogs) are predictive of market outcomes, they retain only certain words (i.e., advertising, award, interesting, and viewed) that consumers would find useful, therefore having general predictive power for market outcomes. Gopinath, Thomas, and Krishnamurthi (2014) address the relationship between the content of online WOM, advertising, and brand performance of cell phones and find that the volume of OUGC does not have significant impact on sales, but only the valence of recommendation UGC has a direct impact. Liu, Singh, and Srinivasan (2015) find that both the volume and sentiments of Tweets do not outperform the information content of Tweets in predicting TV series ratings. Although these three papers have investigated the importance of qualitative UGC through text mining techniques, such studies have not accounted for the detailed dimensions of specific contents. For example, Onishi and Manchanda (2012) use only 4 words out of top 30 frequently cited words for their analysis, and Gopinath, Thomas, and Krishnamurthi (2014) classify the OUGC into three disaggregated dimensions (i.e., attribute, emotion, and recommendation) without further classifications of subcategories and valence of positivity and negativity. Liu, Singh, and Srinivasan (2015) mainly focus on positive and negative Tweet contents about TV shows, lacking further classification of functional and emotional dimensions. In contrast to these studies, this study aims to examine in-depth multidimensional aspects of the content of online reviews, i.e., qualitative UGC, and their impacts on product sales. In this process, we develop defensible measurements of UGC by executing a comprehensive empirical text analysis and evaluate the impact of measures of qualitative UGC relative to volume measure of quantitative UGC. Specifically, we analyze a large data set of UGC on the 350 most talked-about smartphone games from seven different genres (e.g., action, arcade, shooting, puzzle, role playing, simulation, and sports) over a 30 month period, August 2010 to February 2013. We utilize a theoretical framework that classifies qualitative UGC into two major perceptions of functional and emotional dimensions. Prior studies show that perceptions of both functional (cognitive) and emotional (affective) dimensions should be considered to investigate their effects on perceived user satisfaction (Coursaris and van Osch 2015) and online shopping behavior (Van der Heijden 2004). It is evident that both functional and emotional UGC influence consumers to purchase a focal product (Lovett, Peres, and Shachar 2013). The functional UGC relates to the positive and negative attributes and beliefs about a product, and the emotional UGC pertains to the feelings and emotions in response to product experience. As an example, consider one innovative car-racing mobile game which, although expensive, has 3D graphics and high level of complexity. After playing this game, consumers may express their feedback on this game online by describing it as well-made, unique, but sometimes fearful (because a high bill charge is expected from excessive playing time), and addictive (because they like the game too much to stop playing it). This type of online reviews contains different types of UGC: functional (e.g., quality, innovativeness) and emotional (e.g., fear). Another layer of our analysis involves the heterogeneity of impact on product sales across different qualitative UGCs. Specifically, we consider the effects of functional UGC on product sales across emotional contexts such as anger and happiness, in other words, a simultaneous association between functional UGC and emotional UGC. For example, although a consumer may be attracted by some reviews on the high quality graphics of a mobile game (functional UGC), she may hesitate to purchase this product because other reviews express their fear about high cost of purchasing virtual goods (emotional UGC). Accordingly, we expect the functional UGC’s effects on sales to be moderated (amplified or reduced) by emotional UGC. We accommodate such interaction effects in both aggregate and disaggregate models. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to empirically identify two dimensions of qualitative UGC (functional and emotional), and shed light on the effects of multidimensional UGC categories on sales. Our findings on the influence of qualitative UGC on product sales are quite different from the prevailing view that firms should pay attention more to the volume of UGC (Chevalier and Mayzlin 2006; Liu 2006) but little to the valence of UGC (Duan, Gu, and Whinston 2008; Godes and Mayzlin 2004; Liu 2006). Rather, our research is in line with recent three papers (Gopinath, Thomas, and Krishnamurthi 2014; Liu, Singh, and Srinivasan 2015; Onishi and Manchanda 2012) in terms of the importance of considering specific contents from a vast amount of text data. However, our paper provides two key contributions. First, we show that specific categories of qualitative online UGC such as functional and emotional variables can be used to predict product sales; this result will be of a high managerial relevance. Especially, traditional methods that use simple metrics such as volume and valence of UGC are less accurate than our method that employs a sophisticated, multidimensional content analysis. Second, the results offer guidance to firms in determining which specific UGC (quantitative or qualitative; functional or emotional; under what contexts) they should focus on for increasing the efficiency of their online marketing activities. Utilizing a large dataset of online reviews on 350 mobile games consisting of four million postings generated for thirty months, the authors identified 76 representative words to describe the functional and emotional UGC using text analysis and word classification. We combined the resulting UGC volumes with weekly sales, resulting in 1,835 observations for analysis with hierarchical Bayesian methods. We find that functional UGC includes 54 representative words to describe various levels of product quality, product innovativeness, price acceptability, and product simplicity, and emotional UGC includes 22 words to express anger, fear, shame, love, contentment, and happiness. The results show that the volume and valence of aggregated functional UGC and the share of aggregated emotional UGC have the positive effects on sales. The volume and valence of functional UGC subcategories have mixed effects on sales and the link is moderated by the share of emotional UGC subcategories. These results are in contrast to those in the literature. Further, a sales forecasting model which includes 13 variables of UGC subcategories shows the best predictive validity. The authors discuss the implications of these results for online marketers.

The purpose of this study was to examine what motivated consumers to purchase the products that they viewed from User Generated Content (UGC) on YouTube. The current research collected 198 YouTube users online survey on their attitude toward UGC, their perceived credibility of UGC, their user activity, parasocial interaction and their purchase intention of the products being reviewed. The results showed these examined variables were positive correlated. Additionally, active users and passive users not only held different attitudes toward UGC and different purchase intentions for the products being reviewed, but also the predictive power was varied.

Research Context The term User Generated Content (UGC) refers to a wide range of consumers’ contributions shared through digital and social platforms. These contributions can take the form of blogs, articulated collections of images, homemade videos (or even “homemade advertising” campaigns) and various types of product reviews and product usage demonstrations (Berthon, Pitt, & Campbell, 2008; Fader & Winer, 2012). In a previous study, we reviewed the OECD (2007) official definition of UGC to encompass the evolving and more holistic nature of this phenomenon. We defined UGC as “content in the form of text, sound, visuals or videos, which has been created by or in collaboration with consumers and disseminated through social platforms across various digital and non-digital channels. UGC can be centered on a brand, product or service or revolve around a topic/issue of interest to the consumer. It can be either solicited as part of commercial or non-commercial initiatives or contributed spontaneously by the consumer” (Montecchi & Nobbs, 2012). Marketing managers are now facing a completely different landscape where the more traditional approaches to brand promotion “are giving way to a messy tangle of market-based communications consisting of multiple authors including customers, competitors, observers, employees, and interested collectives” (Muniz Jr. & Schau, 2011). In this context, UGC is a clear representation of how the balance of power and control has shifted from brands to consumers (Sheehan, 2010; Pires, Stanton, & Rita, 2006; Berthon, Pitt, Plangger, & Shapiro, 2012). Amongst the various sectors which have benefited from a constant growth of digital channels and consumers’ online engagement, the luxury industry has shown some astonishing results. After an initial skepticism, major luxury organisations have embraced digital channels from both a distribution and marketing communications perspective, following the success of online pure-players such as Net-A-Porter. With online sales projected to grow steadily, luxury brands need to learn how to engage more effectively with a new generation of hyper-connected customers by re-addressing the balance of power and control they want to manage. Purpose of the Research By building on Smith, Fischer, & Yongjian (2012) framework for the analysis of UGC, this research aims to map the features of brand related UGC across three social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter and YouTube) with a particular focus on the luxury product/market context. Through the analysis of a sample of brand-related digital contributions, a set of customer profiles will be constructed to highlight further targeting opportunities for luxury brands. Three brands operating at global level (Louis Vuitton, Rolex and Burberry) will be selected as the context of this investigation since these generate a significant level of consumers’ discussion and engagement on digital media. Methodology The research design is based on observational netnography and content analysis (Ertimur & Gilly, 2011; Kozinets, 2002). A sample of 100 consumers’ contributions for each brand, published on each of the three selected platforms, will be analysed for a total of 900 pieces of UGC. The framework which will be used for the analysis is derived from the research conducted by Smith, Fischer, & Yongjian (2012). It allows researchers to explore the level of customers’ self-presentation, the centrality of the brand in the content shared, whether there is an attempt to a brand-directed communication and associated responses and whether the content is more factual or emotional. The brand sentiment in each piece of content will also be measured. The results of this analysis will be used to construct a multi-dimensional set of customer profiles by building on the UGC typologies identified. This will provide luxury brands with an effective tool to enhance their market segmentation and targeting capabilities.

지상파방송사들과 판도라TV 사이의 분쟁은 동영상 UCC 공유의 저작권법적 문제가 우리에게도 더는 피할 수 없는 현안이 되었음을 보여준다. 대부분의 동영상 UCC가 방송프로그램이나 영화의 일부를 발췌, 편집하고 수정하는 방법으로 만들어지고 있으므로, 이를 업로드하거나 UCC 공유서비스를 통하여 다운로드하여 재생하는 이용자의 행위는 원저작물의 복제, 전송으로써 저작권 침해행위가 되고, 동영상 UCC 공유서비스업자는 이를 방조한 자로서 책임을 지게 될 가능성이 있다. 그러나 동영상 UCC와 그 공유는 동시에 사회적, 문화적으로 수동적인 수용자에 불과하였던 개개인을 능동적인 창조자로 재탄생시키고, 1인의 천재나 통제된 기업이 아닌 분산된 개인들에 의한 집단적 창작이라는 새로운 창작방식을 가능하게 할 잠재력을 갖고 있다. 종래의 저작권법에 따른 규율이 이러한 잠재력을 질식시키지 아니하도록 하기 위하여, 기존의 저작권법의 틀 내에서는 자유이용의 항변을 확장하고, 손해배상을 엄격하게 제한하며, 면책조항을 활용하는 방법을 생각할 수 있고, 나아가 CCL 운동을 활성화하거나 판도라TV 등이 주장하는 이른바‘인용권’을 인정하는 방법을 생각할 수 있으나, 모두 현실적이고 실효성이 있는 대안이라고 하기는 어렵다. 판도라TV가 사적으로 이른바‘인용권’협정을 맺고 있고, 또한 그 전망이 반드시 어둡다고 보이지는 아니한다. 잠정적으로는 이와 같은 사적인 협정에 의하여 질서가 도출될 수 있도록 이해관계자들 사이의 교섭을 촉진하는 법집행이 바람직하다.