Exploring the Impact of Online Reviews with Brand Equity for Online Software Purchasing Behavior Completed Research Paper

Online purchasing is a booming business and is studied extensively in marketing and information systems research. Online product reviews are one factor that influence a consumer's purchasing behavior and attitudes. Brand equity is a popular phenomenon that influences purchasing behaviors and attitudes of consumers. We seek to answer two questions in this research. First, do online consumer reviews contain elements of brand equity? Second, do these elements of brand equity in the online consumer reviews affect software purchasing? We develop an integrative research model which test these constructs on software downloads. We use data collected from CNET's Download.com . We then analyze the effect of these reviews on software downloads using panel data week by week over a 42 week span. All four dimensions of brand equity (brand awareness, brand associations, perceived quality, and brand loyalty) show significant impacts on software downloads with perceived quality being the most influential.