Word Of Mouth (WOM): A Case Study

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In the following word of mouth will be explained, as it is a very important source of information and plays a role in nearly every situation in the daily life, starting from a normal conversation with friends to obtaining recommendations that possibly lead to decisions in the end, also in regard to the travel planning.
Word- of- mouth (WOM) was described by Arndt (1967, as cited in Kaiser, 2012) as “oral person to person communication between a receiver and a communicator whom the receiver perceives as non-commercial, regarding a brand, a product or a service” (p.4). A simpler definition was provided by Kotler (2006, 408) – “personal communication about a product between target buyers and neighbours, friends, family members and associates” …show more content…

Probably the most important limitation is that they only have little control over its valence or degree to which it is spread. Positive and favourable WOM may increase the purchase probability of the recipient; however negative WOM has the opposite effect and can damage the reputation of the product or service severely. Samson (2006) stated that people tend to give greater weight to negative than positive information and therefore are more likely to remember the negative information and events. This is the so-called “negativity bias”. Moreover he stated that negative comments are likely to survive more easily across time and in the worst case the result of negative WOM can lead to bad publicity published in the internet.
Another limitation of WOM can deal with too high expectations. Litvin et. al. (2006) stated that positive WOM directly increases the recipients´ expectations which may lead to dissatisfaction if these expectations are not met after purchasing the product or service.
To conclude, WOM is a very powerful communication tool in marketing and can increase the purchase probability enormously. On the other hand WOM involves a risk of negative publicity especially since the internet introduced the e-WOM and made it possible to communicate about products and services

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