Social media sentiment polarization and its impact on product adoption

Prior marketing research on eWOM has focused on the effect of overall sentiment (valence) of online conversation on product or brand performance, whereas little research has examined the impact of sentiment polarization, that is, the degree to which positive and negative sentiments are simultaneously strong. Through a combination of experimental study and quantitative modeling of archival social media data, the present study examined the impact of eWOM polarization on consumer new product adoption. Our experimental study shows that eWOM polarization increased consumer attitudinal ambivalence, which in turn decreased new product adoption intention. In our quantitative modeling study, we developed a measure for quantifying eWOM polarization on social media, and estimated its impact on sales of video game consoles. The result replicated the negative impact of eWOM polarization and further showed that the negative impact is more pronounced at the early (vs. later) stage of product life cycle.