Effect of Customer Characteristics, Content Characteristics and Source Credibility on Customer Response: Developing A Conceptual Model for The Tourism Industry

Year 2020, Volume: 16 Issue: 16, 1 - 24, 30.06.2020

Neha Zaıdı Vandana Ahuja Mohammed Naved Khan

Abstract

Social media has brought about a huge transformation in the way people interact,
share information and socialize. This changing trend has created opportunities for
organisations to divert their marketing spending on social media platforms, as this enables
a more direct interaction and engaging relationship with customers. This paper presents
a review of literature pertaining to the factors that impact the creation and usage of user
generated content (UGC) on a social media-based travel community. The study proposes
a conceptual model that will help researchers in exploring a traveller’s perspective about
UGC, in making well informed choices pertaining to destinations, hotels, etc. The study
further focuses on customer characteristics, source credibility and content credibility as
antecedents of customers’ response (information usage and information sharing) while
considering the user generated content on a travel community on social media, treating
customer engagement as a mediating variable.
The paper suggests how the travel and tourism industry can use social mediabased
communities as a medium of information sharing and getting feedback to
strategically position their service offerings in a competitive industry. This research will further help both academicians and marketers to better understand, analyse and explain
customers’ responses on a social media-based travel community and will suggest avenues
for future research

Keywords

Tourism, Content Credibility, Source Credibility, User Characteristics, User Generated Content

References

• Albuquerque, P., Pavlidis, P., Chatow, U., Chen, K.Y., & Jamal, Z. (2012). Evaluating promotional activities in an online two-sided market of user-generated content. Marketing Sci, 31(3), 406–432