Bouche à oreille: compréhension et gestion du marketing de référence (document en anglais)

Word of mouth: understanding and managing referral marketing

FRANCIS A. BUTTLE

Manchester Business School, Booth St. West, Manchester, M15 6PB, UK

Marketing practitioners and theorists routinely cite the power of the personal referral on customer behaviour. However, relatively few companies have tried to harness the power of word of mouth (WOM). Scholars have been pondering WOM over 2400 years, although modern marketing research into WOM started only relatively recently, in the post-war 1940s. WOM can be characterized by valence, focus, timing, solicitation and degree of management intervention. Most recent WOM research has been conducted from a customer-to-customer perspective, even though WOM is found in other contexts such as influence, employee and recruitment markets. Marketing research into WOM has attempted to answer two questions. What are the antecedents of WOM? What are the consequences of WOM? This paper integrates that research into a contingency model and attempts to identify researchable gaps in our knowledge.

KEYWORDS: Referral marketing; relationship marketing; word of mouth

INTRODUCTION

Word of mouth (WOM) has been acknowledged for many years as a major influence on what people know, feel and do. Work on interpersonal influence has ancient origins. Aristotle produced what has been called ‘the most important single work in the history of speechcraft’ (Thonssen and Beard, 1948, p. 63) in the fourth century BC. The book Rhetoric (Aristotle, trans. Roberts, 1924) emphasized the persuasive significance of three artistic proofs controlled by a speaker: ethos, pathos and logos. Ethos, the ethical and personal appeals of a speaker, includes all the ways the speaker projects personal qualities so as to elicit belief on the part of the listener. Pathos comprises the emotional appeals of the speaker. Logos or logical appeals in the form of examples and enthymemes were regarded by Aristotle as the basis of reasoned discourse. Some 23 centuries later there now exists an immense literature on interpersonal communication (Littlejohn, 1990). Britt’s (1966) seminal review of the derivative relationship between consumer behaviour theory and the social sciences pointed out the impact of WOM on consumers. Among the research reported were the experiments in which Asch (1955) and a group of confederates conspired through WOM to convince unaware experimental subjects, despite clearly visible evidence to the contrary, that one of three lines marked on card A was a length match for another line drawn on card B. The earliest edition of Kotler’s (1967, p. 456) marketing management textbook acknowledged that ‘advertising is one of several influences on a person’s behaviour and probably less important – because it is known to be self-serving – than such influences as peers and personal observation’. The foundation of

0965–254X # 1998 Routledge

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WOM’s alleged powers is not expressed here in terms of Aristotle’s three proofs, but of the speaker’s independence. Aristotle, however, would have recognized this as an ethical appeal. Thirty years later, in the late 1990s, marketers, particularly those who espouse the emergent relational paradigm, are keen to harness the power of WOM.

THE POWER OF WORD OF MOUTH

Research generally supports the claim that WOM is more influential on behaviour than other marketer-controlled sources. Indeed, it has been observed that WOM can be more influential than neutral print sources such as Which and Consumer Reports (Herr et al., 1991). WOM has been shown to influence a variety of conditions: awareness, expectations, perceptions, attitudes, behavioural intentions and behaviour. Sheth (1971) concluded that WOM was more important than advertising in raising awareness of an innovation and in securing the decision to try the product. Day (1971) inferred that this was due to source reliability and the flexibility of interpersonal communication. He computed that WOM was nine times as effective as advertising at converting unfavourable or neutral predispositions into positive attitudes. Mangold’s (1987) review of the impact of WOM in the professional services context concluded that WOM has a more emphatic influence on the purchasing decision than other sources of influence. This is perhaps because personal sources are viewed as more trustworthy (Murray, 1991). In the industrial purchasing context, WOM influences expectations and perceptions during the information search phase of the buying process and influences attitude during the pre-choice evaluation of alternative service providers (Lynn, 1987; Stock and Zinsner, 1987; Woodside et al., 1992). The influence of WOM on expectations has been reported by Webster (1991) and Zeithaml et al. (1993).

WOM can influence decisions either positively (Engel et al., 1969; Richins, 1983) or negatively (Tybout et al., 1981; Bolfing, 1989). It does appear that negative WOM has a more powerful impact than positive WOM (Arndt, 1967). Technical Assistance Research Program (1986, p. 4), for example, reported that dissatisfied customers are likely to tell twice as many people as satisfied customers. Desatnick (1987), citing research conducted for the White House Office of Consumer Affairs asserted that ‘90%or more who are dissatisfied with the service they receive will not buy again or come back. Worse still, each of those unhappy customers will tell his or her story to at least 9 other people, and 13% of those unhappy former customers will tell their stories to more than 20 people’. It is not reported to how many these WOM recipients retell the story.

DEFINING WORD OF MOUTH

Arndt (1967) was one of the earliest researchers into the influence of WOM on consumer behaviour. He characterized WOM as oral, person-to-person communication between a receiver and a communicator whom the receiver perceives as non-commercial, regarding a brand, product or service (Arndt, 1967). This was an attempt to identify the domain of WOM research. More recently, Stern (1994) defined WOM by drawing on its distinctiveness from advertising. She wrote that ‘WOM differs from [advertising. . .] in its lack of boundaries. . . .WOM involves the exchange of ephemeral oral or spoken messages between a contiguous source and a recipient who communicate directly in real life . . . Consumers are not assumed to create, revise and record pre-written conversational exchanges about products and services. Nor do they ordinarily use poetry or song to discuss consumption. Finally, WOM

UNDERSTANDING AND MANAGING REFERRAL

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