Differential effects of reviewer-attribute disclosure on emotion-mediated purchase intention in spoken and textual word-of-mouth

Abstract

In e-commerce, reviewer attributes such as age and gender can influence how consumers interpret word-of-mouth (WOM). However, it remains unclear whether explicit reviewer-attribute disclosure affects purchase intention in the same way for spoken and textual WOM, because speech itself conveys paralinguistic speaker information. This study investigated whether reviewer-attribute disclosure moderates the emotion-mediated effect of WOM features on purchase intention. Japanese participants were assigned to either an attribute-available or attribute-not-available condition and rated their perceived emotions and purchase intention after listening to synthesized WOM speech or reading WOM text. Moderated mediation analysis showed that, for textual WOM, the emotion-mediated effects of text features on purchase intention were significant only when reviewer attributes were disclosed. In contrast, for spoken WOM, the emotion-mediated effects of speech features were significant regardless of disclosure. These findings suggest that the role of explicit reviewer-attribute disclosure may differ between spoken and textual WOM. This modality-specific pattern is consistent with the possibility that spoken WOM provides paralinguistic information related to speaker attributes even when reviewer attributes are not explicitly disclosed.