A structural model of millennial tourist behavior towards tourism in Davao Region

Increasing product awareness, spreading information about product features, and reducing consumers’ hesitation towards purchasing are key marketing objectives. One of the modern tools to support these objectives in today’s Social Media-driven world is eWord-of-Mouth. Empirical research shows that eWord-of-Mouth is relevant for a large percentage of consumers’ buying decisions. Literature defines eWord-of-Mouth as “any positive or negative statement made by potential, actual, or former customers about a product or company which is made available to multitude of the people and institutions via the Internet” (Hennig-Thurau, Gwinner, Walsh, & Gremler, 2004). eWord-of-Mouth marketing actively tries to influence and/or encourage Word-of-Mouth, e.g. by seeding a message on Social Media or by rewarding consumers/fans to engage in Word-of-Mouth, etc. As it is difficult to control eWord-of-Mouth, researchers are interested in identifying avenues to manage it for marketing purposes. Literature identifies credibility as the key factor for message adaption (Case, Johnson, Andrews, Allard, & Kelly, 2004), but empirical evidence is rare when it comes to identifying what drives credibility of eWord-of-Mouth. Our paper closes this gap by identifying the key drivers of credibility in eWord-of-Mouth based on a comprehensive literature analysis and a field study using an online questionnaire (n = 161). The results demonstrate that credibility is predominantly influenced by source, message, and media credibility. Since Social Media sources are often anonymous, credibility surrogates the need to be identified: our paper gives evidence that expertise/know-how, style of speech, and logic/structure of message reasoning are perceived as the credibility drivers. Concerning media credibility, ease of navigation/usability, and structure were identified as key drivers. Visual elements and interactivity were not identified as significant drivers of media credibility. From a practical perspective, to collect, systematise, filter, and analyse positive and negative recommendations are particularly important for firms. Moreover, companies should support consumers in writing high-quality reviews by offering templates. As all theoretical research, this paper is subject to limitations, too. The sample selection process is an arbitrary selection and the survey design can cause problems in terms of clearly allocating a causal connection. Hence, future research may focus on more sophisticated sampling techniques.