Emotionalor Nonemotional?The Effect of Emojis on the Usefulness of Online Restaurant Reviews
Following the development of the Internet,online reviews have become a major way for consumers to obtain information about products and services,which reduces their level of perceived uncertainty.Review usefulness helps consumers to quickly screen products and make purchase decisions.Hence,exploring the factors that increase the usefulness of online reviews is a critical area of marketing research.In particular,using emojis as symbolic images is now common worldwide,and scholars are increasingly considering their utility in online communications.However,the research literature on emojis in the context of online reviews is very limited.The only studies available to date have shown that emojis have a significantly positive effect on review usefulness,but there is a lack of exploration into whether this positive effect is affected by the number of emojis.In this study,we categorized emojis into emotional and nonemotional emojis and explored the mechanism of their influence on review usefulness as well as the moderating effect of narrative and list review formats using the elaboration likelihood model.The following noteworthy conclusions were obtained following three experiments:1)reviews with emojis are more useful than reviews without emojis;2)there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between the number of emojis and review usefulness;and 3)affective response or processing fluency mediates the effect of emotional or nonemotional emojis on review usefulness;and 4)the review format has a moderating effect on the above mediating effect.These results have important theoretical implications for the literature.First,this study enriches the literature on the usefulness of emojis in reviews by demonstrating that too many emojis leads to cognitive overload for readers,which reduces their perception of review usefulness.In addition,there are different mechanisms by which different types of emojis affect review usefulness.Second,based on the elaboration likelihood model,this study adds to the literature by introducing affective response and processing fluency as mediating variables for the emotional and nonemotional emojis that influence review usefulness,respectively.Third,this study explores the moderating role of review formats and extends the literature on the influence of information presentation formats on consumer psychology and behavior in the context of online reviews.The results also have management implications.First,they can be used as guidelines to create more meaningful online reviews,especially for people who wish to write useful reviews.Second,our study will help companies to quickly and accurately screen out Internet posts with higher usefulness to make timely responses to suggestions or even negative information that may arise.Therefore,this study provides effective and practical strategies for optimizing user experiences in terms of promoting both highly useful reviews and emoji recommendations.
emojisreview usefulnessaffective responsesprocessing fluencyreview format
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