The Empirical Study On The Effect Of Word Of Mouth And The Factors In Chian's Rural Market

In China's rural market, because of the increase of farmers' income and consumption, the improved environment of consumption, and the support of national policies, the rural market further expands. Meanwhile, the competition of the urban market has intensified, which forces companies to turn to the rural market seeking for new opportunities of development. And a number of companies have expanded to the rural market and achieved good results.The existing researches on Word of Mouth(WOM) mainly pay attention to the urban market rarely to the rural market. And many researches have proved that WOM has a large impact on consumer in many aspects, for example, WOM can increase consumers' awareness on the related product, spread information about the product and affect consumer's purchase decision in short-term and long-term. However, the special environment raises new standards and challenges to companies' marketing in the rural market. Due to the impact of economics, geography and culture, the farmers are much more cautious in spending, and their purchasing decisions are easily affected by WOM, which makes the consumption in the rural market be alike to a largely extend. So, it shows that the WOM marketing is suitable for the rural market, and the lower costs, the larger effect also make the WOM marketing become the fist choice for the enterprises to entry the rural market and enlarge the business.This paper builds the model about the effect of WOM, and reveals the effect of WOM on the recipient and the factors that affect the effect through exploratory factor analysis and structural equation model (SEM) analysis. The conclusions are the followings. Firstly, the trust, the recipient's trend to trust, the recipient's concept of consumption, the recipient expertise, the sender's motivation and the recipient's initiative to search information are positively related to the effect of word of mouth, while the perceived risk is negative. Second, the tie strength, the sender's motivation, the recipient's trend to trust and the sender's expertise are positively related to the trust, while their indirect effects on the WOM effect through trust are small. Third, the recipient's concept of consumption, the tie strength, the recipient's trend to trust and the sender's expertise are negative with the perceived risk, while their indirect effects on the WOM effect through the perceived risk are small.According to the above conclusions, this paper proposes the following policies for enterprises to carry out business in the rural market. First, as farmers tend to have a larger trend to trust, so companies need to make efforts in design to meet farmer consumers' needs to maintain and enhance the farmer's trend to trust. Second, companies also should cultivate the consumer a healthy and fashionable consumption concept in the rural market. Third, companies can reduce the consumer's perceived risk through improving the quality and providing good after-sales service. Fourth, companies should make full use of the opinion leaders' impact on the consumers in the rural market, establish and develop a good relationship with the consumers. Fifth, companies should increase the farmers' initiative to search and send information on the company or product through providing much benefit to the consumers. Sixth, companies should increase the farmers' knowledge about the product to raise their expertise.