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Top1. Introduction
Due to the digitalization of businesses, the firms allow customers to express their experience concerning the product or service on their web platforms in terms of feedback termed electronic word-of-mouth (EWOM). These EWOMs can influence the buying behaviour of customers, as potential customers look out for reviews related to the product/service before making the final purchase decision (Banerjee, Bhattacharyya, & Bose, 2017). This is particularly true for experience goods or services, the response for which cannot be attained before its usage. Appreciating the utilization of EWOM by various platforms, the role of the review poster (reviewer) has turned out to be indispensable. This is because prospective customers consider this raw information provided by such reviewers as trustworthy and credible in comparison to those provided by companies or third-party travel agents (Craciun & Moore, 2019). These reviewers help the service providers by raising voices against their bad practices and applauding the good ones (Chua & Banerjee, 2015).
Keeping in mind the trustworthiness or credibility of the reviewers, it becomes necessary for websites to keep these reviewers attached within their community. Not all reviewers have equal contributions since feedback provided by them is a generous task and there is no return for their inputs (Liang, Schuckert, Law, & Chen, 2017). Extrinsic motivation can be provided by organizations which may be some monetary incentives (Meng, Webster, & Butler, 2013). Monetary incentives in return for a review might look like a bribe and so firms have started emphasizing on providing non-monetary rewards in the form of badges or labels (Antin & Churchill, 2011). Therefore, this study aims to segment reviewers into a badge hierarchy, based on review as well as reviewer characteristics. The reviewers are evaluated based on review characteristics such as review length, sentiment, and readability; while the reviewer characteristics considered are number of cities visited, miles travelled, years of membership, number of helpful votes, age, location, gender, total reviews posted, and total photos posted.
This type of appreciation will encourage new reviewers as well as maintain activeness among the existing ones (Schuckert, Liu, & Law, 2016). Many websites have already started working on this, for example, TripAdvisor gives five badge categories in terms of the level of contribution; Yelp provides an elite badge reflecting the competency and expertise of reviewers; Amazon utilizes the top 10,000 reviewers badge to reward outstanding reviewers. However, the premise underlining the qualifications for providing the badge/medal is the same. In some question-answer platforms, the medals are provided based on the acknowledgments received by the responder, similarly, websites allot labels/badges based on the volume of reviews posted by them (Meng et al., 2013). This is the motivation behind proposing the present study. This is important as reviewers with higher badge levels are asserted to be more trustworthy and credible sources as compared to ones with lower badge levels (X. Liu, Schuckert, & Law, 2018). So, this becomes important from both the customers’ and firms’ end as feedback provided by such sources will influence the sales, price, revenue, and loyalty of both the stakeholders (Casalo, Flavian, Guinaliu, & Ekinci, 2015; Chen, Liu, & Chang, 2013; Schuckert, Liu, & Law, 2015).