Significance of eWOM in the road of customer journey : Acceptance Of Ewom Towards Cross-Cultural Boundaries.

Abstract: The digital era began a few years ago and day by day the dominance of the digital era is easily captivating all aspects of life. The business world is not out of that and for that reason, eWOM has born as a completely customer dominant platform. A few years back, people either normally depended on the information that the manufacturer wants them to know or had not enough opportunity to know in detail. Alternatively, traditional WOM (word of mouth) is where people get opinions from their friends and family members, and we would like to express it as a limited opportunity. Now the platform is getting wider, and information is vastly available to all because of technology.The goal of this thesis is to determine how eWOM influences consumer purchase intentions, as well as to determine how eWOM influences cultural variations in purchase intentions. Customer purchase intent is a complicated notion that requires customers to go through a procedure known as the customer journey. In this journey, different touchpoints and interactions might influence the consumer journey differently. As a result, customer's taste or brand loyalty might be affected. Previous researchers have found some noticeable positive findings of the relationship between customer journey and the touchpoints, but the analysis based on cultural aspects and considering eWOM as newly emerged touchpoints remained unexplored. Our expressed research question is,‘How does the eWOM affect the customer journey and in what significance it impacts on the customer's purchase intention in the cross-cultural boundaries?’To develop the conceptual framework, we used eWOM and customer journey theory its newly emerged components of eWOM. To examine the cultural aspect, we have chosen individualist-collectivist dimension out of six developed by Hofstede because we believe, culture is the core value of a society, which has a great impact on people. Regarding contribution, this paper is effective in both practical and theoretical fields. Practical contribution is our findings that provide important findings, which can help organizations develop their future strategy to cope with the customer-generated platform (eWOM). Theoretically, our research is contributing to some components of digital marketing by filling the gap, which we have found. Keywords: eWOM, electronic word of mouth, Customer journey, Individualist-Collectivist culture, Customer purchase intention.