The Role of Negative eWOM in a High Involvement Decision Context

Sammanfattning: The main purpose of this thesis is to uncover the relationship that exists between the formation of purchase intentions and the factors that influence the process of intent formation; a specific focus will be given to the discovery of the impact of negative eWOM within a consumer’s pre purchase decision context. The thesis uses an inductive and qualitative design. The authors propose and apply two data collection approaches, non participant observations and semi structured interviews. Grounded theory and scenario analysis are utilized as main tools of analysis. This thesis builds upon prior WOM and eWOM literature and consumer behavior theory literature. The primary theoretical foundation however is based on Howard & Sheth (1967) consumer decision model and helps our understanding of the consumer purchase behavior and its components within the decision process. Data was collected over a month long period via non participant observations and semi structured interviews with male Swedish consumers. There were four concepts discovered that influence the process of intent formation. Out of these four, two concepts, namely information exposure and information evaluation are the most important, when a specific focus is given on negative eWOM within a consumer’s pre purchase high involvement decision context. The impact of negative eWOM is quite intense and consumers are thus very much influenced by negative eWOM during the pre purchase decision process.