Expert or Customer? A Multi-Category Investigation of the Impact of Online Review Source on its Effectiveness

With the growing role of Internet in everyday life and in consumer practices, the impact of online content not generated by marketers has attracted attention from the part of researchers and practitioners. The impact of product and/or services evaluations and experiences—online reviews—on sales, product choice and purchase intention is widely accepted. However, recent studies widely neglect the multiplicity of types of online reviews available on the Internet. In this paper we aim to fill in the literature gap by differentiating online reviews based on its source: expert or customer. We concentrate on the challenging and little studied case of new products. Our results show that online reviews are effective for products that are difficult to assess prior to purchase and expert reviews have a more significant impact in the promotion of these products.