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.