Developing a Scale to Measure Need‐to‐Tell Personality Trait to Predict Consumers' Willingness to Provide Online Reviews

ABSTRACT There is little debate that consumers' online reviews have a significant impact on corporate sales and profit. Thus, companies must create an overall strategy to manage online posting, and one important aspect of the strategy is to formulate an online review acquisition plan. An online review acquisition plan requires an in‐depth understanding of posting behavior. While past research has focused on motives to explain why consumers post online reviews, to create a more comprehensive understanding of online posting behavior recent research has called for a deeper examination of the relationship between personality and posting behavior. To address the need for more context‐specific personality predictors of online reviews, we propose a personality construct called “need to tell” and develop a scale to measure this construct. We conducted three studies to develop items and establish scale psychometric properties (Study 1), establish construct validity in reference to the nomological net of need to tell (Study 2), and establish criterion and incremental criterion validity with relevant online posting outcomes (Study 3). Our results indicate that the developed measure of need to tell is both reliable and associated with popular online posting behavior metrics. This newly developed scale can be used when segmenting consumers to identify those most likely to be impacted by nudges to post online reviews.