Nowadays, in the technological era, social networking sites (SNSs) have the capacity to influence, through electronic word‐of‐mouth (eWOM), consumers' attitudes towards brands and companies. ...Consequently, eWOM via SNSs has become an important marketing communication tool for facilitating consumer interaction, acquiring new customers, and enhancing customer loyalty. However, despite the extensive research conducted to identify and depict the antecedents of eWOM, the prediction of whether and to what extent brand‐related content will be shared on SNSs, based on consumers' personality traits, is still an area of marketing that needs further research. Grounded in the trait theory of personality, the current study's objective is to analyze the impact of SNS users' materialism, narcissism, self‐esteem, and extraversion on eWOM diffusion, both directly and indirectly, mediated by referral visit behavior and knowledge‐based validation. For this, an online survey was conducted among a sample of 301 Romanian Facebook users, data being analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modeling. Our findings reveal a high prevalence of eWOM among SNS users, more than one‐third of the investigated sample having a tendency to pass along information about products and brands in SNSs. The results show that eWOM diffusion in SNSs is positively predicted (directly and indirectly) by users' materialism, extraversion, and narcissism, while the total effect of self‐esteem on eWOM diffusion is insignificant. The research provides useful insights for online marketers, concerning psychographic segmentation and social media communication, as well as for SNS developers, with regard to improving the segmentation and targeting tools offered to online marketers.
Japan, Russia, and Turkey are major examples of countries with different ethnic, religious, and cultural background that embarked on the path of modernization without having been colonized by a ...Western country. In all three cases, national consciousness has played a significant role in this context. The project of Modernity is obviously of European origin, but is it essentially European? Does modernization imply loss of a country's cultural or national identity? If so, what is the "fate" of the modernization process in these cases? The presence of the idea and reality of civil society can be considered a real marker of Modernity in this respect, because it presupposes the development of liberalism, individualism and human rights. But are these compatible with nationalism and with the idea of a national religion? These questions are the more pressing, as Japan is considered part of the Western world in many respects, and Russia and Turkey are defining their relation to the European Union in different ways. An investigation of these three countries, set off against more general reflections, sheds light on the possibilities or limitations of modernization n a non-European context.
PDF
