What Drives Negative Electronic Word-of-Mouth Online?

The online environment has highlighted the role of negative experiences and emotions by enabling fast and widespread publicity. Recent research has introduced both word-of-mouth and engagement as central concepts relating to negative communication online. In the field of public relations, the previous literature has mostly addressed negative engagement through individual topics such as reputation and crisis communication, but there has been little attention to the different forms it takes. By utilizing recent literature on word-of-mouth (WOM), negative word-of-mouth (nWOM), and electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) communication, we propose negative electronic word-of-mouth (neWOM) as a rising ph…