Does Who You Are Determine What Helps You? Role of Consumer Personality and the Perceived Helpfulness of Online Customer Reviews

Purpose: Online customer reviews (OCRs) are an essential informational resource in e-commerce, but little is known about the interaction between review type and reader type. This research explores whether consumer’s hedonic or utilitarian personality orientation moderates the relationship between OCR type (hedonic vs. utilitarian) and perceived OCR helpfulness, and whether this moderation is further conditioned by product type. Design/methodology: A 2 (OCR type: hedonic vs. utilitarian) × 2 (product type: bar soap vs. perfume) × 2 (personality type: hedonic vs. utilitarian) mixed factorial experiment was conducted with 586 usable responses collected in South Korea. Review-type and product-type manipulations were validated, personality orientations were measured with established shopping-value scales, and hypotheses were tested using three-way ANOVA with simple-effects decomposition. Findings: Personality orientation significantly moderated the review type–helpfulness relationship (F(1, 586) = 14.67, p < 0.0001), and this moderation was itself qualified by product type (three-way interaction: F(1, 586) = 24.23, p < 0.0001). When the review type was congruent with the product context, personality-mismatched readers—hedonic consumers reading utilitarian reviews and utilitarian consumers reading hedonic reviews—reported the highest helpfulness, whereas reviews that mismatched both the product and the reader received the lowest helpfulness ratings. Implications and originality: The results indicate that review helpfulness is an emergent property of the review–reader–product configuration rather than of review text alone, providing e-commerce platforms with a basis for orientation-aware review ranking, solicitation, and page design.