Effects of Customer Reviews on Product Sales of Strong Brands:

Abstract

Consumers use online customer reviews as an indicator of product quality before making their purchase decisions. The brand is also a powerful cue of product quality for individual products from strong brands, and the impact of customer reviews for these products may be relatively low compared to that for products from weaker brands. However, in the existing literature, the role of customer reviews on the sales performance of products from strong brands has not been examined thoroughly. To address this problem, the present study examines sales of headset data in Japan using a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA). The results show that products from strong brands can achieve high sales regardless of customer review ratings during the new product period. However, high customer review ratings play an important role, as an INUS condition, for these brands to be successful in terms of sales beyond the new product phase. This implies that even if a brand is strong, it is still important to develop superior products that result in high customer review ratings.

Keywords

• product quality
• review ratings
• inus condition