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User-generated content (UGC) refers to any digital content that is voluntarily created and posted as videos, pictures, blogs, tweets, and posts by the users of various social media or websites. Given the ease of creating and disseminating UGC in an online environment, these have become a force to recon with (Fader and Winer, 2012; Krishnamurthy and Dou, 2008). These UGCs deliver content in either informational or demonstrational format (Blythe and Cairns, 2009). However, this creates a serious problem, as there is no way of ensuring that the viewer perception of the UGC’s execution format matches the creator/uploader’s intended format. Viewers could easily misclassify the UGC format due to factors such as the incongruence between the richness of medium, the execution format and the product complexity (Simon and Peppas, 2004). This misclassification, in turn, could affect the viewer’s evaluation of the UGC and their purchase intention. Thus, this study examines whether viewer attribution toward an UGC on evaluative characteristics (i.e. vicarious experience, perceived transparency, feeling of connectedness with the reviewer, perception of risk and their purchase intention towards the focal product) is influenced by viewer misclassification of the UGC format. We also examine if misclassification of UGC format influences the relationships between viewer’s evaluation of UGC on various characteristics and their purchase intention towards the focal product.
Importance of this study is highlighted by the fact that approximately 400 hours of UGCs are uploaded to social medium such as YouTube every minute (Bergman, 2017). User generated reviews, a popular form of UGC, have also been found to influence consumer purchase decisions (Chevalier and Mayzlin, 2006; Jin and Phua, 2014) with about 90 per cent of the respondents relying on online reviews before purchasing anything (Gesenhues, 2013). This is because consumer reviews are often considered to be more reliable and trustworthy than information provided by companies (Bickart and Schindler, 2001). Thus, it is important for both the UGC creators and the firms whose products are being reviewed to ensure that there is no mismatch between the execution format and consumers’ perception of UGC. Although marketers recognize the impact of consumer-to-consumer information exchange and UGC on consumers’ brand attitude and purchase intention, there is limited research on this topic (Christodoulides et al., 2012; Okazaki, 2009). This study tries...