Personal and social benefits: consumer beliefs towards product review blogs

Online blogs that offer reviews of products, services and technologies increasingly attract interest among public relations practitioners, as well as academic scholars. This paper reports on blog readers’ perceptions of the personal and social benefits offered by these specialized blogs as a new communication medium. The study surveyed 169 Australian online consumers. A personal and social benefits (PSB) multi-item scale, traditionally employed in an advertising research context, is adapted and validated to gauge consumer perceptions and offer strategic directions across demographic segments. The findings suggest that the adapted PSB scale to measure perceptions towards blogging exhibits sufficient internal consistency as well as evidence of convergent and content validity. Factor analysis suggests that the construct in this instance is uni-dimensional, therefore the 10 items can be summed to provide an overall reflection of the PSB dimension of consumer beliefs toward blogs. While the findings cannot be generalized to an international context, the PSB scale adapted from an advertising context can be used as a survey tool to gauge perceptions of the personal and social benefits towards blogs in general and within a specific target audience. This study enables managers to focus communication methods to a range of customer groupings in diverse and appropriate ways. This study confirmed that while gender and education do not necessarily have an influence on PSB, it is inversely related to age. The study suggests that blogs would be appropriate for communicating with younger consumers while older consumers may be better reached through more traditional media, such as product reviews in newspapers and magazines.