Effects of Review Characteristics and Consumer Regulatory Focus on Perceived Review Usefulness

Employing regulatory focus theory, we explored how consumer regulatory focus interacts with 2 characteristics of a consumer review-review valence and claim type-to influence consumers' perceived usefulness of the review. To this end, we conducted an experiment with 126 college students as participants. The results showed that promotion-focused consumers perceived a positive review to be more useful than did prevention-focused consumers, whereas prevention- focused consumers perceived a negative review as more useful than did promotion-focused consumers. We also found that promotion-focused consumers perceived an evaluative review as more useful than did prevention- focused consumers. Unexpectedly, however, both promotion- and prevention- focused consumers perceived a factual review to be highly useful.