Consumers' Motivations and Segmentations in Participating Online Product Reviews

Taking the online shopping consumers as the research subjects and using exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, we investigate consumer motivations of writing online product reviews.We also use cluster analysis to segment consumers based on their review motivations.Our results show that consumer motivations of delivering online product reviews include seeking social interactions, providing help to others, perusing self-enhancement, protecting appropriate rights and venting negative emotions.Based on these motivational categorizing, consumers can be divided into five segments, i.e., ones that value social interactions, reputation, self-relevance, rationality and altruism.