The effect of electronic word of mouth on the purchasing behaviors of consumers: A research on Kütahya Dumlupınar University students

Web 2.0 technologies, which emerged due to the development of the Internet, have been initiated a new era with the opportunities offered, and transformed the resources they have applied to meet the information needs of the consumers. With the establishment of Web 2.0 platforms where consumers can generate and share content, opinions and experiences related to products and services have been begun to be shared on these platforms, so the communication to the word of mouth has also transformed into electronic word of mouth communication. The aim of this study is to determine the effect of electronic word of mouth communication on consumer purchasing behaviour. For this purpose, a questionnaire study was conducted on the students of different departments of the Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences of Kütahya Dumlupınar University and the factors determining the effect of electronic word of mouth on the purchasing behavior of consumers were investigated. In accordance with the information obtained from the related literature, a research model has been developed, where the number of comments, the confidence in the commentator, the quality of the comments and the confidence factors in the interpretation are considered as independent variables, and the validity of the model has been examined by regression analysis. The findings of the study revealed that the number of comments, confidence in the commentator, the quality of the comments and the confidence in the interpretation have a positive and significant effect on the purchasing behavior of the consumers.