A Study On Consumers' Word-of-Mouse Expectation And Satisfaction

With the development of the online community, more and more consumers post their word-of-mouth onto online communities, which induces huge amount of word-of-mouse (WOM) information. Furthermore, more and more consumers tend to search WOM before they make the purchase and consider it as a reference for the final decision. Hence, questions such as how consumers search for WOM information and how searching behavior influence the subsequent purchase decision become interesting topics that draw attentions from both researchers and practitioners. It has been found out that with the accumulation of the WOM searching experience of the consumers, some "wiser" consumers would place different importance on different WOM sources and characteristics. However, how consumers select WOM sources, what kind of expectation they have for future WOM search and what the outcomes are after whether their expectations are satisfied or not, still remain unanswered.In order to answer questions mentioned above, WOM expectation is considered as the core concept and the online community is regarded to be the research circumstance in our study. Three research tasks are fulfilled as follows:Firstly, regarding the confusing definitions of WOM, definitions of word-of-mouth, internet word-of-mouth and word-of-mouse are compared through their intrinsic characteristics, to investigate the relationship among them. Furthermore, a new definition of word-of-mouse is developed based on its characteristics.Then, based on the literature review and focus group interview, this study conceptually explores the WOM influencing characteristics from the perspective of influence on WOM receivers. Five WOM influencing characteristics are found to attract the attentions of the consumers; they are concreteness, vividness, strong in valance, informativeness and trustworthiness. Based on the outcomes from qualitative studies, a scale of WOM influencing characteristics with good reliability and validity is also developed through the quantitative methods.Finally, two typical online communities on the internet are involved in this study; they are company sponsored forums and consumer sponsored forums. Relationship between WOM expectations and satisfaction is also investigated. Results show that in the company sponsored forums, consumers expect to see WOM with informativeness and trustworthiness; while in the consumer sponsored forums, consumers expect to see WOM with concreteness, vividness and strong in valance. In the simulated online communities, we explore the satisfactory problem in two circumstances, where consumers'expectations are satisfied and not satisfied. The results show that in these online communities, when the consumers'WOM expectations are satisfied, they will feel satisfied; and when the expectations are not satisfied, they will feel dissatisfied. The difference is that in company sponsored forums, if the consumers'WOM expectations are satisfied, they will show great satisfaction to WOM messages and a little satisfaction to online companies. Conversely, if the consumers'WOM expectations are not satisfied, they will show great dissatisfaction to the companies and a little dissatisfaction to the WOM messages. However, in consumer sponsored forums, if the consumers'WOM expectations are satisfied, they will show great satisfaction to online communities and a little satisfaction to WOM messages. Conversely, if the consumers'WOM expectations are not satisfied, they will show great dissatisfaction to the online communities and a little dissatisfaction to the WOM messages. Based on all these results, Word-of-Mouse & Online Community Role Model has been developed to describe the relationship between WOM expectations, community types and satisfaction.The novelties and inspirations of this study are threefold:(1) by making the relationship among word-of-mouth, internet word-of-mouth and word-of-mouse clear, definition of word-of-mouse is revised, which provides a solid basis for future research in this field; (2) based on the literature review and interview to the participants in the online community, this study extracts five WOM influencing characteristics from the perspective of influence on WOM receivers, and a multiple-item scale with good reliability and validity is also developed. This scale with five WOM influencing characteristics can fill the gap of the WOM measurement in this field; (3) the relationship between WOM expectations, community types and satisfaction is described, which is a creative finding and it will increase the existing knowledge for understanding consumers'WOM search behavior.Beyond that, our results also have great implications for practitioners. Firstly, re-defining WOM is beneficial for practitioners to understand WOM intrinsic characteristics; it is also helpful for them to distinguish word of mouth, internet word of mouth and word of mouse. All these provide better foundation for future WOM marketing; secondly, our results for five influencing characteristics of WOM are useful for practitioners to understand the attractiveness of online communities and the scale developed in our study is also helpful for evaluating WOM effectiveness; thirdly, results on the relationship between WOM expectations, community types and satisfaction are beneficial for practitioners to understand the focus of managing online communities, as well as perform appropriate strategies to increase the attractiveness of their communities.