Consumers Online: Introducing the Online Reputation as a New Segmentation Criterion

摘要

The purpose of this research is to propose a new segmentation criterion anchored in e-reputation perception. A survey was addressed to a French consumer panel (n = 1100) concerning their perception of corporate e-reputation and three key consequences in branding management, respectively perceived value, perceived risk, and WOM. It extends in several ways the research done by Walsh et al. (2011) which was the first published research to segment the market based on corporate reputation as an attitude. Thanks to a confirmatory factor mixture PLS based model, and relying on a recently proposed customer-based online reputation scale (Youness & Valette-Florence, 2016), it is empirically shown that consumers can be divided into three distinct clusters based on their attitude toward the online reputation, namely the Emotional Reputation Lovers, the Innovative Reputation Adopters and the Rational Reputation Fans. Complementary analyses lead to a better and finer understanding of these different clusters of e-consumers based on online reputation. In an online context, Youness and Valette-Florence (2016) defined the customer-based online reputation as the assessment done by the online buyers of a company based on their general online experience with this company.