Research questions

From the analysis above, it indicates that opinion leaders can not only exert informational influences on others through the eWOM dissemination, but also exert interpersonal influences through the interaction with others. Hence, opinion leaders play vital roles in the marketing. For marketers, they can make full use of opinion leaders to strengthen the influences of their marketing strategies. Furthermore, the virtual communities of consumption, inside which individuals are interested in consumption, become popular and begin to be considered as a proper online space in which the marketers should employ marketing strategies for promoting products or services. Facing with the new electronic marketing environment, utilizing opinion leaders towards the eWOM communication to affect the purchase behaviors of consumers, becomes a focus of the researches related to opinion leaders.

Under this situation, two researches questions are pointed out in this thesis.

1) How to explain the mechanism of how opinion leaders affect the purchase intentions of the consumers in the virtual communities of consumption?

The models, proposed by Kozinets et al. (2010), explain the mechanism of the eWOM flow in the virtual communities and show how opinion leaders spread the information from marketers to the public. In such situation, marketers can utilize opinion leaders to spread information to potential or actual consumers and to affect them to some degree. However, it is still a question that how can these opinion leaders affect the potential consumers in the virtual communities. Hence, for the marketers who want to utilize opinion leaders, considering the informational and interpersonal influences of opinion leaders towards the consumers, they need to figure out the mechanism of how opinion leaders affect the purchases intention of consumers in the virtual communities of consumption. After finding out the influential factors of

opinion leaders, these marketers can develop more efficient and more effective strategies.

Because the aim is to investigate the mechanism of opinion leaders towards the purchase intentions of consumers in the virtual communities of consumption, the theories related to consumers need to be studied so as to figure out the influential factors of opinion leaders on them.

Previous researches have pointed out some methods and theories for explaining the factors which affect intentions or behavior of consumers.

From the existing researches, the most influential models and theories on consumer behavior include Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA) (Ajzen & Fishbein, 1975), Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) (Davis, Bagozzi, & Warshaw, 1989), Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) (Ajzen, 1991), Information Adoption Model (IAM) (Sussman & Siegal, 2003) and so on.

Among these models and theories, Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) (Davis, 1986) and Information Adoption Model (IAM) (Sussman &

Siegal, 2003) are comparatively representative and practical for investigating the purchase intentions of Internet users.

On one hand, TAM is used to explain and to predict the determinants of individuals' acceptance of information technology (Davis et al., 1989) and is one of the most widely used model in the field of information system (Y. Lee, Kozar, & Larsen, 2003). Researchers have extended its explanatory power in many contexts, including banking technology, email, online games, desktop video conferencing and so forth (Ha &

Stoel, 2009). Particularly, since online consumers exhibit the features of being both traditional consumers and computer users, some researchers use TAM to study their purchase intentions.

On the other hand, IAM is used to explain how individuals are affected by the online information (Sussman & Siegal, 2003). Since collecting and selecting online information play important roles in the purchase decision making process of consumers (J. F. Engel, Kegerreis, &

Blackwell, 1969; Howard & Jagdish, 1969; Xia Wang, Yu, & Wei, 2012; D.

H. Zhu, Chang, & Luo, 2016), IAM has been used to study the purchase intentions.

In the existing researches, in order to increase the explanatory power of TAM and IAM, researchers have pointed out various extended models and applied the models to various situations respectively. However, the related research for using these models to investigate or explain the mechanism of how opinion leaders affect the purchase intentions of consumers is blank. Hence, in order to fill in the research gap, Part 1 is going to utilize the models related to consumer behavior for further study.

After the literature review, four small questions are explained and answered. These small questions include 1) For this study, which traditional model of consumer behavior will be more suitable? 2) Whether can the original model be used for this study? 3) How did other researchers adjust this model for study? 4) How to design the model for this study based on the model selected as the basic model?

After these four questions are answered, the model for the Part 1 can be built up and testified by empirical analyses.

2) How to identify opinion leaders in the virtual communities of consumption in which they cannot be identified directly?

The opinion leaders, who affect the attitudes or behaviors of the public through eWOM communication (Flynn, Goldsmith, & Eastman, 1996; Forbes, 2013; Goldsmith, Flynn, & Goldsmith, 2003; Rogers &

Cartano, 1962; Stern & Gould, 1988), has been confirmed to exert their influences inside the social media (Momtaz, Aghaie, & Alizadeh, 2011; X.

Song, Chi, Hino, & Tseng, 2007).

Considering the crucial influences of opinion leaders on the consumers, companies and marketers pay more and more attention to utilize the opinion leaders.

Furthermore, after the mechanism of how opinion leaders affect the purchase intentions of the consumers in the virtual communities of consumption being investigated from the Part 1 of this thesis, the companies and marketers can have a better understanding of the

influential factors of opinion leaders and of how to utilize them.

However, there are actually two kinds of virtual communities of consumption, including:

 Virtual communities of consumption exhibiting the attributes of members, such as their number of followers. Namely, inside such kinds of communities, the outsider can identify the opinion leaders directly, based on their standards.

 Virtual communities of consumption failing to exhibit the attributes of members, such as their number of followers. Namely, inside such kinds of communities, the outsider cannot identify the opinion leaders directly.

To be more specific:

Some virtual communities have the functions of exhibiting the attributes of the members, such as the number of followers. Inside such forums, the opinion leaders can be easily distinguished from other Internet users. Obviously, the more followers the individual has, the more likely will he or she be the opinion leader and the more influential this individual will be. After figuring out who are the opinion leaders, the members can follow them and are more likely to be affected by their recommendations. Meanwhile, the companies can also easily figure out opinion leaders and utilize them, such as cooperating with them for advertisements (Hirsh, 2001).

However, some virtual communities do not have this function and fail to show who are the opinion leaders directly. In such communities, some individuals send out posts and attract other members by knowledge or something else. They interact with the repliers actively, thus they can accumulate followers. The followers are willing to pay attentions to the posts from these influential individuals and are more likely to follow their recommendations. It is easy for followers to identify these influential factors by terms of ID, but for outsiders, such as marketers, it will be difficult to judge the influential individuals, let along utilizing them for developing more effective marketing strategies. Admittedly, for the individuals who have already been opinion leaders in the real world, they can be better recognized by other members online. But for the

individuals who become the online opinion leaders directly, it will be difficult for the marketers to recognize the opinion leaders.

Facing with this situation, it becomes a question that how to identify opinion leaders in such virtual communities of consumption in which the opinion leaders cannot be identified directly before utilizing them.

Prior researches show that there are many approaches to identify online opinion leaders and that three main approaches for identifying online opinion leaders include the user attributes analysis, the text mining analysis and network structure analysis. However, few research is about identifying the online opinion leaders in the virtual communities of consumption, let alone in the virtual communities of consumption in which they cannot be identified directly. Hence, in order to fill in the research gap, the Part 2 is going to have an empirical study on identifying these opinion leaders.

According to the literature review, social network analysis (SNA), one type of network structure analysis, is found to be suitable for this research because of its unique advantages. By using SNA, three small questions can be analyzed and answered. These questions include: 1) How to identify the opinion leaders in such virtual communities of consumption? 2) What are the characteristics of such virtual communities of consumption? 3) How do the opinion leaders affect the eWOM dissemination?

Firstly, many researchers have used the social network analysis (SNA) to identify the opinion leaders in many kinds of social networks.

Although few research is about using SNA in the virtual communities of consumption. SNA is found to be suitable for such cases.

Secondly, SNA is widely used for studying the structure of social network. Hence, utilizing SNA can investigate the characteristics of such virtual communities of consumption.

Thirdly, although the influence of opinion leaders towards the eWOM dissemination in the online communities has been confirmed and to be existing by Kozinets et al. (2010), how do the opinion leaders affect the eWOM dissemination in details is still unclear. One advantage of SNA is that it could create several virtual scenarios based on the assumed

changes in relationships. Hence, when utilizing SNA to identify opinion leaders, the data with and without the opinion leaders can be compared and discussed. By doing so, how the opinion leaders affect the eWOM communication can be figured out.

By utilizing SNA, the answer to the third small questions can be answered.

1.2. Research significance and key concepts