The Influence of Product Knowledge and Perceived Risk on the Behavior of Word-of-Mouth Seeking－A case on Ganoderma lucidum Consumers of Taipei
Date Issued
2009
Date
2009
Author(s)
Chang, Yung-Chia
Abstract
Recently, improved consumer awareness of personal health and preventive medicine stimulate development in the market for health food. Health food has an inherently high relevance to consumer, resulting in a certain degree of perceived risk. Hence, consumer attempt to seek information can reduce perceived risk during the decision making process. Word-of-mouth becomes an ever important source of information and a more convincing information compare to other sources. Moreover, demonstrated to affect information search, information processing, and decision-making, consumer knowledge remains an important topic to consumer researchers. hus, this article use Ganoderma lucidum as the research target aims at studying whether the consumer’s product knowledge of health food will affect the perceived risk and word-of-mouth searching behavior. Furthermore, this article also investigates whether perceived risk is termed as a mediator variable between consumer’s product knowledge and word-of-mouth searching behavior.he relationship structure among product knowledge, perceived risk and word-of-mouth searching behavior is built based on reviewed literature, and the effective sample number in the survey is about 314. The study utilized structural equation modeling (SEM) to analyze the study results and examine the research hypotheses. The study result shows that perceived risk and word-of-mouth searching behavior are significantly negative related to consumers'' subjective product knowledge. And there is a significantly negative correlation between consumers’ objective product knowledge and word-of-mouth searching behavior. In the meantime, perceived risk and word-of-mouth searching behavior are significantly positive related. Furthermore, perceived risk is not a mediator variable between consumer’s product knowledge and word-of-mouth searching behavior.
Subjects
health food
functional food
subjective product knowledge
objective product knowledge
information searching
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