Offline Context Affects Online Reviews: The Effect of Post-Consumption Weather

Mobile Ad Effectiveness: Hyper-Contextual Targeting with Crowdedness

Leif Brandes and Yaniv Dover

Journal of Consumer Research, 2022, vol. 49, issue 4, 595-615

Abstract: This empirical study investigates whether unpleasant weather—a prominent aspect of a consumer’s offline environment—influences online review provision and content. It uses a unique dataset that combines 12 years of data on hotel bookings and reviews, with weather condition information at a consumer’s home and hotel address. The results show that bad weather increases review provision and reduces rating scores for past consumption experiences. Moreover, 6.5% more reviews are written on rainy days and that these reviews are 0.1 points lower, accounting for 59% of the difference in average rating scores between four- and five-star hotels in our data. These results are consistent with a scenario in which bad weather (i) induces negative consumer mood, lowering rating scores, and (ii) makes consumers less time-constrained, which increases review provision. Additional analyses with various automated sentiment measures for almost 300,000 review texts support this scenario: reviews on rainy days show a significant reduction in reviewer positivity and happiness, yet are longer and more detailed. This study demonstrates that offline context influences online reviews, and discusses how platforms and businesses should include contextual information in their review management approaches.

Keywords: online reviews; weather; mood; user-generated content; context effect; automated text analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/jcr/ucac003 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:jconrs:v:49:y:2022:i:4:p:595-615.

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Consumer Research is currently edited by Bernd Schmitt, June Cotte, Markus Giesler, Andrew Stephen and Stacy Wood

More articles in Journal of Consumer Research from Journal of Consumer Research Inc.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().