Social free sampling (SFS) campaigns are an increasingly popular marketing practice in which firms provide trial users with free sampling products and collect posted trial reports from trial users on social commerce sites to attract prospective consumers. This paper aims to examine how trial users’ product evaluation in SFS influence appreciative reader engagement by utilizing the persuasion knowledge model (PKM).
To test our theoretical framework, 3,427 trial reports were collected from an SFS site and analyzed using Poisson regression models.
SFS evaluation is negatively associated with readers’ appreciative engagement. We also found that higher emotional intensity in SFS reports or higher reputation of the trial user mitigates the negative effect of the product evaluation. However, when the trial report with stronger emotional intensity is written by a trial user with a high reputation, the negative impact of the SFS evaluation on appreciative engagement becomes more pronounced.
Although extant research has acknowledged product rating bias in product trial reports, limited empirical studies have examined the impact of product ratings on reader engagement. This empirical study bridges the voids of product rating bias in the social free sampling literature and provides important managerial implications for the emerging social free sampling.
Brands should be careful of the negative effect of high product rating and this negative effect can be mitigated by inviting users of high reputation.
This study is among the first ones that examine the effect of SFS product evaluation on appreciative engagement and provide a nuanced understanding of how product evaluation, user reputation and emotion intensity jointly shape reader engagement.
