Managing Online Communities and E-WOM: Prosumers’ Characteristics and Behaviors in the Food Service Sector

Nowadays having a good online corporate reputation is a valuable resource for organizations, especially in the food and beverage service sector. Potential diners frequently rely on people’s opinions shared online in choosing a new restaurant. In so doing, online communities are gaining increasing importance in influencing the customer journey. This research aims to better understand the prosumers’ use of social media (i.e. people that are both consumers and social media users and that contribute to create digital contents) in choosing a restaurant and reviewing it online. In particular, we want to investigate if prosumers’ characteristics or habits, can influence their use and perception of social media, such as looking for information, writing feedbacks, and trust online reviews. In this paper we will focus on two main prosumers’ characteristics or habits: the frequency of going to a restaurant and the willingness to try new restaurants. Our main findings suggest that prosumers that frequently go to a restaurant have a different approach to social media being more inclined to used them both for gathering information and for reviewing their experience. Similarly, we find that prosumers that have an “explorative” behavior (i.e. enjoy to frequently try new restaurants), use social media differently from prosumers that have a “loyal” behavior, i.e. that choose the same and familiar restaurant. In this explorative study we adopted a quantitative methodology by using a survey on 315 Millennials prosumers. Theoretical and managerial implications are also developed.