Trust, But Verify: A Multi-level Examination of Online Reviews and Persuasion Knowledge

Stories of companies (and pranksters) manipulating online reviews are abound in the news. These actions potentially affect consumer trust not only at the review-level, but also their perceptions of specific websites (platform-level) and online reviews as a whole (system-level), as consumers struggle to discern real reviews from fake. The Persuasion Knowledge Model (PKM, Friestad & Wright, 1994) offers a useful framework for understanding how consumers identify and respond to persuasion attempts. The basic idea behind this framework is that consumers develop contextualized persuasion knowledge (PK) about persuasion tactics, agents, and appropriate responses to allow them to navigate the marketplace. Researchers have explored PK in the context of direct persuasion situations, such as sales or advertising (Campbell & Kirmanı, 2000; Kirmanı & Zhu, 2007), but the relationship between PK and online reviews is less clear, largely due to the limited research on the topic. From a broad perspective, online reviews can take many forms; from individual consumer reviews (e.g., Amazon, ePinions) to blogs and vlogs. Research suggests that subtler forms of sponsored content, such as branded editorials, do not always activate skepticism and recognition of persuasive intent (Boerman, Willemsen, & Van Der Aa, 2017). Consumer reviews may be particularly challenging, as those that are sponsored may be nearly identical to genuine perspectives. One study noted a wide variation in consumers' application of PK in this context (Bambauer-Sachse & Mangold, 2013), though the prevalence of fake reviews has received more attention in the media since this study, perhaps leading to greater PK activation. Thus, we investigate: to what extent does PK activation occur in the context of online reviews? Based on two available studies, avoidance was the most prominent coping behavior when PK was activated in an online consumer review context (Bambauer-Sachse & Mangold, 2013; Reimer & Benkenstein, 2016). However, the focus was at the review level, and did not consider the effects on consumer perceptions of the platform or system-wide, of reviews in general. Therefore, we investigate a second set of questions: how does PK manifest at the system- and platform-levels? What subsequent coping mechanisms do consumers employ? To investigate these questions, we use data from 22 semi-structured depth interviews (McCracken, 1988) that involved general questions as well as real online product searches, whe