Word of Mouth and Social Media

Allan J. Kimmel, Philip J. Kitchen, Allan J. Kimmel, Philip J. Kitchen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317689973
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Business

This collection examines a key new development in the contemporary marketing landscape, the relationship between the informal exchange of information and advice among consumers – known as word of mouth (WOM) – and emerging social media. Whereas WOM has been around since as long as people have engaged in conversations, its transmission is no longer limited to face-to-face interactions over the clothesline and across backyard fences. Today, the dissemination of WOM through online channels such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube channels, blogs, and consumer forums has significantly altered the alacrity by which product and service messages are spread across a dramatically expanded consumer audience. As marketing practitioners have come to recognize the power of online WOM in terms of its impact on consumer beliefs, attitudes, and purchasing behavior, effective strategies for leveraging the consumer conversation require greater insight and understanding of WOM and social media.

Towards that end, this book offers ground-breaking research from an impressive array of internationally renowned marketing researchers on the nature and dynamics of WOM transmitted through social media channels, advancing our understanding of consumer influence, which to date has largely focused on offline WOM. Among the topical issues covered are best practices for marketing practitioners, the conversational nature of online WOM, the dynamic interplay between online and offline WOM, WOM measurement and monitoring, and cross-cultural influences on WOM.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Marketing Communications.

WOM and social media: Presaging future directions for research and practice

Allan J. Kimmel^a and Philip J. Kitchen^b
aMarketing Department, ESCP Europe 79 avenue de la République, 75543 Paris Cedex 11, France;
^bESC Rennes School of Business, 2, Rue Robert d'Abrissel, Rennes 35000, France

Word of mouth (WOM) has become the focus of growing interest among marketing practitioners and consumers. However, the promises of WOM marketing are often oversold, and various assertions about the nature of WOM, its dynamics, antecedents, and consequences at times have been misstated in mass-mediated articles and books on the topic. In this introductory paper for the special issue on WOM and social media, we survey the current state of WOM knowledge and the role of WOM in contemporary marketing, reconsider common beliefs about the WOM process in an effort to separate WOM facts from fallacies, and presage some future directions and best practices in light of evolving online channels of WOM generation and transmission.

In a 2005 chapter on the subject, George Silverman, author of The Secrets of Word of Mouth Marketing, astutely characterized word of mouth (WOM) as 'the oldest, newest marketing medium'. Despite grammatical awkwardness, the phrase perfectly describes the status of WOM in the contemporary marketing landscape. Although journalists, pundits, bloggers, and others of their ilk herald WOM influence as if it were a relatively new phenomenon, the WOM process has been part and parcel of human discourse for as long as people have engaged in conversation. Silverman's phrase is a reminder that although WOM is as old as the oral tradition, it has gained new prominence today, in marketing and other areas, as a result of the greater connectedness of people via social media and the considerable speed with which interpersonal messages can spread.

Technological developments have facilitated the means by which people connect to each other, bringing to the fore the influence of social networks and interpersonal communication. Managers now recognize that their customers and prospects are more powerful and skeptical than ever before, with consumer-to-consumer influence at times taking precedence over purchasing and related behaviors previously shaped by the business-to-consumer marketing tools of advertising, public relations, promotion, direct mail, and personal selling. With the advent and rapid evolution of the Internet and mobile communication devices, the familiar adage, 'there is power in numbers' perhaps has never had greater resonance. In an age in which marketers can reach their audiences with greater facility than in the past, firms have never been less influential in relation to their customer targets. These developments underscore the growing prominence of social media in marketing communication plans, as practitioners strive to leverage online consumer conversations to achieve marketing objectives. In our introductory article for this special issue on WOM and social media, we provide a brief overview of the current state of knowledge, trace the growing role of WOM in marketing, review common beliefs about the WOM process, and presage some future directions and best practices in light of evolving online channels of WOM generation and transmission.

WOM preface: a brief history

WOM has entered the public's collective consciousness largely as a result of various developments, including publication of successful trade books, such as The Tipping Point (Gladwell 2000), Unleashing the Idea Virus (Godin 2001), and The Anatomy of Buzz (Rosen 2002), and a growing awareness of successful word-of-mouth marketing (WOMM) campaigns (e.g., Hotmail, Procter & Gamble's Tremor, the Blair Witch Project, Hunger Games, and Dove's 'Share a Secret'). Yet, the term 'word of mouth' began appearing in the literature much earlier, having been originally coined by William H. Whyte, Jr. in a 1954 Fortune magazine article entitled 'The Web of Word of Mouth'. In his article, Whyte reported an interesting phenomenon regarding room air conditioners, which at that time had just been introduced into the American consumer market. He observed that if one passed through urban neighborhoods (where the air conditioners typically were mounted in a front window), the appliance appeared to be distributed in clusters of homes rather than in a random fashion. That is, six houses in a row might have had an air conditioner, whereas three on either side would not. A similar patterning was apparent with the distribution of televisions, as indicated by antennas on rooftops around the same time. Whyte concluded that the ownership of such consumer goods reflected patterns of social communication within the neighborhoods – that people who talked together about products and services showed similar purchase and usage behaviors; that is, they were influenced by others in consumption-related decisions. Of course, communication tools then were much more limited then than they are today, so it is understandable that a linear pattern of communication prevailed in analyses of interpersonal exchange during the early 1950s. As Whyte (1954, 140) described it, interpersonal communication was most likely to occur in informal exchanges 'over the clothesline' and 'across backyard fences'.

One year after the appearance of Whyte's article, Katz and Lazarsfeld (1955) published their landmark book. Personal Influence, which elaborated on the role of WOM in the mass communication process. Their 'two-step flow' model of communication postulated that certain people among close personal friends and family members – opinion leaders – can exert personal influence on the decision-making of others by passing on through informal WOM conversations information they received from the media. Although long since supplanted by more complex models of communication transmission (see Kimmel 2010), the early WOM publications acknowledged how consumers have the capacity to affect each other's attitudes and behaviors relative to something in the marketplace (e.g., a brand, a store sale, an advertisement), and were influential in undermining the image of a passive audience at the mercy of all-persuasive mass media –the so-called one-step flow (Weiman 1982).

However novel these early observations about consumer influence (e.g., Katz and Lazarsfeld 1955; Whyte 1954) must have seemed a half-century ago, the power of WOM as understood today is taken as a given in the contemporary marketplace. There is evidence that WOM represents a primary source of information for consumer buying decisions (Chevalier and Mayzlin 2006; East, Hammond, and Wright 2007; Liu 2006; Mangold, Miller, and Brockway 1999), and can shape consumer expectations (Anderson and Salisbury 2003; Zeithaml and Bitner 1996), pre-usage attitudes (Herr, Kardes, and Kim 1991), and post-usage perceptions of a product or service (Bone 1995; Burzynski and Bayer 1977). By contrast, the influence of traditional marketing campaigns, such as mass media advertising, has diminished (cf. Kitchen 2010; McConnell and Huba 2007), whereas integration of messages has accelerated (Schultz, Patti, and Kitchen 2011). As consumers worldwide are disillusioned by the relentless bombardment from traditionally mass-mediated marketing messages, they are turning to each other for insight into brands, products, and services, in large part because of the perceived greater trustworthiness of the advice they receive from interpersonal relations (e.g., Edelman 2008; Rusticus 2006).

To date, although there is compelling evidence that a majority of instances of WOM occur offline, largely among intimates such as friends and family members (So-called close ties) (e.g., Keller 2011), online social networking channels are providing an increasingly attractive means for the rapid and widespread dissemination of electronic WOM (eWOM) among people who, for the most part, never encounter one another in any offline context. Thus, social media provide incidental means for WOM to disseminate across multitudes of persons who may only be linked by a common interest or need (so-called weak ties). Because of the nature of interpersonal contacts involved in offline WOM episodes, such communications tend to be imbued with higher levels of trust and credibility than eWOM. However, in addition to its greater reach, eWOM is characterized by greater specialization, that is, there is likely to be an apparent expert about virtually anything online, as opposed to one's close circle of intimates, and there is evidence that trust levels can be high for unknown consumers engaged in eWOM on trusted websites (e.g.. Brown, Broderick, and Lee 2007). Moreover, because eWOM is likely to be written, it is less transitory than offline WOM. In light of these points, it is easy to understand why a majority of consumer firms in recent years have become active participants in social media forums to better engage with consumers and to have some influence over eWOM. According to an August 2012 eMarketer report, 88% of US companies with at least 100 employees were using proprietary public-facing social network tools for marketing purposes, a figure that is projected to rise to 92% by 2014 (eMarketer 2012).

Although it may be true that most companies today are using social media to satisfy the objective of influencing WOM, in many cases, such efforts are merely perfunctory, carried out with minimum degrees of acumen regarding methods for connecting with customers and leveraging consumer conversations, and without a clearly established social media strategy or policy. According to various models of social media maturity (e.g., Diaz 2010; van Luxemburg and Zwiggelaar 2012), companies are classified as 'pre-social' or 'ad hoc' when their online activity consists of nothing more than establishing websites and emailing customers without any social media strategy or policy. Such firms often operate under the false assumption that these kinds of one-directional communication activities equate to active social media involvement. Other companies are more aptly classified at the stage of 'connection' or 'experimental', going through the motions of setting up a Facebook page. Twitter accounts, and YouTube channels without a clearly thought-out social media strategy, and with operational functions siloed within a corporate division, such as a public relations or human resources department. A truer form of social media involvement occurs at the 'engagement' or 'functional' stage, which typically involves engaging in two-way communication with consumers (e.g., responding to comments posted on a firm's blog or Facebook page), with social media utilized for well-defined purposes and integrated within marketing campaigns. At this functional level of social media maturity, borders between corporate divisions fade because of the use of social media throughout a firm, the development of a social media policy, and the establishment of a structure for responding to consumers. At the most advanced level of social media maturity, the 'social advantage' or 'transformation' stage, organizations take steps to make conversations actionable through cocreation and collaborative problem solving (van Luxemburg and Zwiggelaar 2012). This approach to social media, exemplified by well-known crowdsourcing projects such as Dell's Ideastorm and Starbucks' My Starbucks Idea, involves the formulation and employment of a social media strategy that eliminates divisions between internal and external stakeholders, enabling the firm to establish a truly cooperative network (Kimmel 2010).

Although these stages of social media maturity are more directly relevant to conversations between firms and consumers, it seems reasonable to assume that a firm's efforts to stimulate or support WOM among consumers are more likely to succeed at advanced maturity levels. For example, at the transformation stage, incorporating consumers' ideas into product or service design can give rise to a feeling among consumers that they have a vested interest in an offering's success and are willing to support and promote it among other consumers.

It has been said that social media have revolutionized corporate communications, enabling companies to shift from traditional, delayed, one-way messaging to a more direct, instantaneous, and expanded dialog with consumers and other carefully selected stakeholders, constituencies, and publics (Matthews 2010). By extension, the nature and content of consumer conversations are also being transformed by social media. However, to date, much of what is known about WOM and the WOM process stems from research focused primarily on offline WOM and from rudimentary comparisons of the frequency, credibility, and evaluative nature of offline WOM and eWOM.

WOM: separating fact from fallacy

Over the years, an impressive body of evidence has accumulated demonstrating how WOM plays a significant role in shaping consumer attitudes and behavior (e.g.. Brown and Reingen 1987; Katz and Lazarsfeld 1955; Rusticus 2006). However, as the term 'word of mouth' has entered widespread parlance, various conflicting assertions and exaggerated claims have

Table 1. WOM: some representative definitions.

'Word of mouth is defined as oral, person-to-person communication between a receiver and a communicator whom the receiver perceives as non-commercial, concerning a brand, a product, or a service' (Arndt 1967, 3)

'Word of mouth is the act of a consumer creating and/or distributing marketing-relevant information to another consumer' (WOMMA 2006)

'By 'word of mouth,' I mean positive or negative communication of products, services, and ideas via personal communication of people who have no commercial vested interest in making that recommendation' (Silverman 2005, 193)

'Word of mouth (WOM) is a message about an organisation's products or services or about the organisation itself. Usually WOM involves comments about product performance, service quality, trustworthiness, and modus operandi, passed on from one person to another' (Charlett, Garland, and Marr 1995)

'In a post-purchase context, consumer word-of-mouth transmissions consist of informal communications directed at other consumers about the ownership, usage, or characteristics of particular goods and services and/or their sellers' (Westbrook 1987, 261)

'Conversations motivated by salient experiences are likely to be an important part of information diffusion' (Higie, Feick, and Prince 1987, 263)

'Word of mouth refers to informal communication between private parties concerning evaluations of goods and services' (Anderson 1998, 6)

'Wo...