Electronic Word of Behavior: Transforming Digital Traces of Consumer Behaviors Into Communicative Content in Product Design

The widespread digitization of consumers’ daily lives creates a plethora of digital traces of consumers’ product-related behaviors. These traces have the potential to be turned into meaningful communicative and observable content by the services that possess them. For example, Spotify displays what users’ friends are listening to; Hotels.com shows how many other users are currently viewing a particular hotel; and crowdfunding platform Gofundme.com exhibits the names of recent backers for a given cause. As such, digitization has profoundly increased the potential observability of consumers’ product-related behaviors. Researchers from both the Information Systems and the Marketing disciplines have taken an interest in investigating the impact of such digitally observable behaviors, and nascent research has found them to have a significant impact on the choices of those exposed to it. However, this dissertation demonstrates that the phenomenon is undertheorized and lacks empirical insights to inform the future design of digital products and services with behavior-based information.