Consumer evaluations of movies on the basis of critics' judgments

✍ Scribed by Alain d'Astous; Nadia Touil

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1999
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 115 KB
• Volume: 16
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0742-6046
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1520-6793(199912)16:8<677::aid-mar4>3.0.co;2-t

✦ Synopsis

Moviegoers commonly use film critics as information sources. This article proposes that consumers engage in a causal analysis of the reasons behind critics' judgments and recommendations about new movies before making their own evaluations. An experimental study was conducted where critic's style, critic's predisposition toward the film director, degree of agreement between the critic's judgment and that of other critics, reputation of the critic, reputation of the film director, and critic's judgment direction were manipulated in a mixed within-subjects factorial design. A summary movie review was constructed for each condition of the factorial design. Viewer's movie evaluations were assessed with the use of four evaluative bipolar scales. Three of the five research hypotheses were fully supported. Consistent with the predictions of attribution theory, it was found that consumers' evaluations of a new movie are more likely to follow the judgment of a film critic when this judgment does not conform to the critic's style (H1), when the judgment is inconsistent with the critic's predisposition toward the film director (H2) and when other critics' judgments show favorable consensus (H3). The other two research hypotheses were partially supported. The impact of the film director's reputation on consumer evaluations (H5) was significant only when the movie reviews were positive, whereas the impact of the critic's reputation (H4) was significant only in the case of negative reviews. The results are interpreted