Millions of customers share product evaluations electronically via the web worldwide. Reviews can be found in different contexts like web-based consumer-opinion platforms (e.g., epinions.com), forums, weblogs, or as integrated online-shop features (e.g., at amazon.com). This new electronic form of WOM (eWOM) has therefore drawn special attention of both practitioners and marketing researchers (Sen and Lermann 2007; Chen and Xie 2008). Former research identified mainly motives for writing and reading consumer articulations on the internet (e.g., Hennig-Thurau et al. 2004; Hennig-Thurau and Walsh 2004) or explored selective elements like text-length and average ratings (Chatterjee 2001; Chevalier and Mayzlin 2006). However, little research has been done to analyze the contents of online reviews themselves. What are customers looking for, when they read an online review? Why do some reviews affect customers more than others? What are the main content related factors that influence the perception of an online product evaluation? This paper aims at providing some first theoretical and empirical analysis's regarding the identification of key content related dimensions and factors of online reviews.
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