Exploring the factors of gastronomy blogs influencing readers’ intention to taste

Abstract

In recent years gastronomy blogs providing an important channel for electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) to take place are quickly becoming a popular new source of reading material for blog readers. However, little is published to understand what factors from gastronomy blogs play critical roles in predicting readers’ intention to taste local food and beverages. Based on reviewing previous studies, this study developed a research model containing three main categories of variables: (1) inspiring taste desire (i.e., experiencing appeal and generating empathy), (2) forming taste awareness (i.e., providing image, delivering knowledge and presenting guides) and (3) facilitating interpersonal interaction (i.e., social influence and cybercommunity influence), and suggested that these potential variables can influence readers’ behavioral intention to taste directly. Data collected from 329 respondents in Taiwan were tested against the research model using the structural equation modeling approach. The results indicated that excluding delivering knowledge, all the other proposed variables (i.e., experiencing appeal, generating empathy, providing image, presenting guides, social influence and cybercommunity influence) were the critical components significantly influencing online readers’ intention to taste, and the proposed model accounted for 70% of the variance. The findings of this study will not only help hospitality and tourism practitioners in understanding the perceptions of potential customers, but also provide insights into research on technology's influence on hospitality and gastronomy.

Introduction

Gastronomy blogs are Internet gastronomic journals. Generally in diary form, a gastronomy blog usually contains description of the author or gourmet's experiences and reviews relevant to local food and beverages tasting. Local food and beverages refer to not only regarding locally grown produce, but should also contain food that demands raw material from outside the area, but that is processed locally (Nummedal and Hall, 2006). Today, gastronomy blogs are quickly becoming a popular new source of reading material for gastronomic fanatics and bloggers. Through gastronomy blogs, readers and writers can create a cybersocial environment that was not possible before. A survey, conducted by Technorati, a search engine that monitors more than 70 million online diaries now, and aimed at understanding the ranking of diverse blogging topics, revealed that the category involving food, beverage and some food-related topics, is ranked 3^rd among the top 18 topics on blogging (Report from Technorati, 2008). In Taiwan, Internet users have been over 13 million and about 70% of whom are bloggers, as well as 45% blogs are updated every week (Report from FIND, 2007). Therefore, blogs have turned into a new form of mainstream of interpersonal communication for millions of people use them to exchange and publish information, as well as establish relationships (Rosenbloom, 2004).

Advertisers have tried to influence word-of-mouth (WOM) for decades. The advent of the Internet has led to a WOM revolution (Dellarocas, 2003). The Web 2.0 applications, like blogs, have created very real impact for the hospitality and tourism industry (Litvin et al., 2008), because they, combined with electronic discussion facility providing a venue where participants come together to offer and seek information, have created an additional channel for product/service recommendations and endorsements between people who have never met, and thus they provide an important avenue for electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) to take place. With the number of blogs increase dramatically, people can share their feelings, photos, ideas, opinions and information on blogs, which, in turn, play considerable roles in eWOM networks (Thompson, 2007). Anecdotal publications have suggested that these online recommendations can be powerful in subsequent choice (Fong and Burton, 2006). Potential readers of gastronomy blogs are using recommendations and information from other gastronomers to make decisions.

Blogs, effective on spreading eWOM (Kaikati and Kaikati, 2004, Thorson and Rodgers, 2006), provide hospitality and tourism promoters with a brand new approach to promoting products, but has big potential to create enormous impact on hospitality/tourism promotion (Lin and Huang, 2006, Litvin et al., 2008). Although the growth rate of blogs is impressive, little research effort has been devoted to investigating the influence of gastronomy blogs, especially from the readers’ perspective. Assessing gastronomy blogs from readers’ perspective can be of great value to both researchers and practitioners. It can be useful to researchers in developing and testing theories relating to gastronomy blogs, enable researchers to justify gastronomy blogs as an effective way in the context of hospitality marketing, and help to understand the drivers behind gastronomy blogs to drive readers’ behavioral intention. By developing such a study, restaurant executives will be able to better justify their web-based promotional activities, especially if they devote a significant portion of their organizational budgets to these activities, as well as to understand how to use gastronomy blogs as part of their business strategies for greater culinary destination promotion. Therefore, the main purpose of this study is to empirically explore the reasons why gastronomy blogs can influence blog readers’ behavioral intention to taste local gastronomy.

The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. In the next section, a review on eWOM and research evidence about it, and then it is followed by descriptions of the research model and hypotheses based on the literature review. After that, we describe the research methodology succeeded by presenting the results of the data analysis and hypotheses testing. Finally, the implications and limitations of this study are discussed.