Exploring the factors of gastronomy blogs influencing readers’ intention to taste
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 3rd 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.
Section snippets
eWOM and research evidence
eWOM, based on Westbrook (1987), refers to all informal communications aimed at consumers through web-based technology regarding the usage or characteristics of particular products and services, or their sellers. This involves communications both from Business to Customer, and from Customer to Customer. The features of online consumer information sharing make eWOM different from traditional WOM in several ways: (1) while traditional WOM (face-to-face “verbal” communication) has momentary
Measures
For most of prior studies on gastronomy and food-tourism did not use a structured questionnaire, there was a lack of appropriate instruments to measure the reasons why gastronomy blogs sway readers’ intention. Therefore, there was a need to develop an instrument for use in this study. Based on reviewing previous literature (Ashforth and Mael, 1989, Cohen and Avieli, 2004, Hsu and Lin, 2008, Huang et al., 2008, Julienne et al., 2005, Kim et al., 2007b, Kim et al., 2009, Lin and Huang, 2006,
Assessment of measurement model
A confirmatory factor analysis via AMOS 7.0 was conducted to test the measurement model. Six common model-fit measures were employed to assess the model's overall appropriateness of fit: the ratio of χ2 to degrees-of-freedom (d.f.), goodness-of-fit index (GFI), adjusted goodness-of-fit index (AGFI), normalized fit index (NFI), comparative fit index (CFI), and root mean square residual (RMSR), and to attain a better model fitness, four items, item 8, 14, 17 and 30 (see Appendix A), were
Discussion and implications
Based on prior studies, this study asserted that two inspiring taste desire variables (i.e., experiencing appeal and generating empathy), three forming taste awareness variables (i.e., providing image, delivering knowledge and presenting guides), and two facilitating interpersonal interaction variables (i.e., social influence and cybercommunity influence) were the major reasons why gastronomy blogs can sway readers’ behavioral intention to taste. Overall, 6 out of 7 hypotheses were supported in
Limitations and conclusions
This study has some limitations that should be addressed in future studies. First, the findings and their implications are obtained from just one study that targeted certain blog readers in Taiwan. Therefore, a cross-cultural validation using another large sample gathered elsewhere is required for further generalization of our findings. Second, the sampling method has potential bias because a sample of willing respondents (i.e., convenience sample) may not be generalizable. To adjust this,
Hsiu-Yuan Wang is an assistant professor in the Department of Hospitality Management at Chung Hua University, Taiwan. She has a master degree in computer science from National Chiao Tung University and a PhD in information management from National Changhua University of Education, Taiwan. Her current research interests include customers’ behavior, travel and gastronomy information searching, post-adoption of information technology, Internet shopping and e-learning. Her research has appeared in
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Hsiu-Yuan Wang is an assistant professor in the Department of Hospitality Management at Chung Hua University, Taiwan. She has a master degree in computer science from National Chiao Tung University and a PhD in information management from National Changhua University of Education, Taiwan. Her current research interests include customers’ behavior, travel and gastronomy information searching, post-adoption of information technology, Internet shopping and e-learning. Her research has appeared in Computers in Human Behavior, Cyberpsychology & Behavior, British Journal of Educational Technology, International Journal of Hospitality Management, Social Behavior and Personality and several conference proceedings.