Search results

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate and analyze the influence of service convenience, service quality and customer satisfaction on the formation of word of mouth in airline industry.

The sample included 400 passengers who had experienced THAI’S international flights. To test the study hypotheses, a research model was examined applying structural equation modeling.

The findings submit that, in addition to effects of service convenience, service quality and customer satisfaction on word of mouth, decision convenience has the most positive significant influence on word of mouth compared to service quality dimensions and customer satisfaction.

The present research focuses on assessing the word of mouth level only for THAI; therefore, its findings may not be generalized for the other airlines. In addition, the target market of this study is the customers of THAI. Future researchers can select the markets of other airlines customers.

In airline companies, service convenience plays a central role on customer word of mouth. Therefore, airlines should concentrate on travelers’ convenience in the service procedure. They should plan the service to support the best convenience for travelers.

This investigation would help airlines to understand what makes customers more satisfied before, during and after using an airline service and to understand how this is related to the word of mouth.

The main purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of corporate image and relationship marketing on trust, the impact of trust on consumer purchase intention, and the moderating effects of word‐of‐mouth between the influence of trust on consumer purchase intention.

Consumers of an online travel agency in Taiwan aged over 18 were taken as the research sample. Primary data were collected through convenience sampling. Regression analysis was used to test the hypotheses.

The main findings are: corporate image has a significantly positive influence on trust, and commodity image has the most significant influence on trust, followed by functional image and institution image; structural and financial relationship marketing has significantly positive influence on trust, and structural relationship marketing has greater influence on trust compared with financial relationship marketing; trust has a significantly positive influence on consumer purchase intention; and positive word‐of‐mouth has a moderating effect between the influences of trust on consumer purchase intention.

Limitations of this study include: the data obtained in this study only reflected the correlations and cause and effect among the variables studied during a specific period of time; this paper only focused on tour agencies; consumers who used only the most popular online tour agencies were selected. Therefore, the samples might involve some bias. The implications of this study include: different types of corporate image will have different levels of influence on consumer trust. There is a need to support the previous study that relationship marketing has a significantly positive influence on consumer trust. The moderating effects of positive word‐of‐mouth between the influences of trust on consumer purchase intention must be examined. The influence of trust on purchase intention must be considered.

The study findings reveal the need and importance for a company to improve corporate image continuously. The study indicates the need to emphasize the use of critical relationship marketing and to realize the nature and importance of the moderating effect of word‐of‐mouth.

The value of this study is combined theory and practical and finding four management implications and three practical implications.

Examines the importance of the verbal exchange of positive and negative information about a firm′s products and services. Presents suggestions for learning what is being said and how to gain systematic control over the word of mouth process. Suggests a model of this process, including interpersonal communications among a variety of stakeholder groups. Highlights the case of the hospitality industry, but makes suggestions of use to all service businesses.

The purpose of this study is to contrast the effects of four exit barriers on word of mouth activities. Monetary, service loss, social and convenience exit barriers are compared. The differential effects of these four barriers on the valence of word of mouth (positive, negative), the type of word of mouth recipient (weak tie, strong tie) and the motives (catharsis, company sabotage) for spreading word of mouth are studied.

The data for empirically addressing a set of hypotheses were collected from 185 consumers. The hypotheses were analyzed using ANOVA models along with post hoc tests.

The results suggest that the type of exit barrier matters. Exit barriers, with respect to word of mouth activities, seem to fall on a continuum. On one extreme, the most detrimental barriers are monetary hurdles, and on the other end, the least detrimental barriers are convenience hurdles. Monetary barriers are responsible for the most negative word of mouth and company sabotage. Social and convenience barriers lead to significantly less.

The implications for erecting exit barriers are discussed. In particular, the value of monetary barriers is questioned. The benefits of such involuntary customer retention methods may be offset by the sabotage they invite through negative word of mouth.

The paper provides insights into word of mouth activities of dissatisfied customers that are trapped by various exit barriers. The word of mouth activities investigated include valence, recipient type and motives. The study contrasts monetary, service loss, social and convenience exit barriers.

This paper aims to investigate the direct and interactive effects of regulatory focus (promotion versus prevention), attribute type (search versus experience) and word of mouth valence (positive versus negative) on consumption decision for a service and a product.

Three empirical studies (two laboratories and a field experiment) using “university” and “mobile phone” as the research setting were used to test the key hypotheses.

Promotion (prevention)-focused subjects preferred experience (search) attributes over their counterparts while making consumption decision. This preference was further reinforced for both promotion and prevention-focused people under positive word of mouth. Under negative word of mouth, in comparison to their counterparts, promotion-focused people still retained their preference for experience attributes, whereas prevention-focused subjects reversed their preference and maintained status quo.

Future research may validate and extend authors’ findings by looking into the underlying process or studying additional word of mouth variables that may moderate the current findings.

The findings will help managers devise a range of marketing strategies in the areas of advertising and product positioning, especially for products/services that are showcased in terms of experience and search attributes.

The current research is novel as no prior research has proposed and tested the two-way interaction between regulatory focus and search/experience attributes, or its further moderation by word of mouth valence.

The purpose of this research is to study the influence of self-service technologies (SST) on cross-buying and word-of-mouth. This study tests the direct impact of perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use on cross-buying and word-of-mouth. Further, this study also tests the mediating role of e-service quality for the aforementioned relationships. The study has been undertaken in the context of retail banking in an emerging market, India.

A cross-sectional survey research design was used to collect data from 235 customers of retail banks in India. The data were analysed using IBM AMOS 23.0 taking structural equation modelling (SEM) approach to test the hypothesised relationships.

The findings of the study suggest that both perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use influence cross-buying and word-of-mouth. E-service quality partially mediates the relationship between perceived usefulness on cross-buying and word-of-mouth. E-service quality partially mediates the relationship between perceived ease of use and cross-buying but does not mediate the relationship between perceived ease of use and word-of-mouth.

This study shows that managers need to focus on perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use in order to ensure cross-buying and promote word-of-mouth recommendations by customers. Also, managers will be able to enhance cross-buying and promote word-of-mouth recommendations if e-service quality delivered by the bank is perceived to be good by customers.

This study contributes to the literature on SST and offers empirical evidence to show that perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use can influence cross-buying as well as word-of-mouth. Previous studies have shown that SST usage can foster loyalty, and the present study offers new evidence on the outcomes of behavioural loyalty. The study has been undertaken through responses taken from retail bank customers in an emerging market. This study also contributes to the literature on SST by testing the mediating effect of e-service quality for the above-mentioned relationships.

Owner‐managers of small businesses invariably cite word of mouth recommendations as the principal way in which they attract new customers. Marketing theory is under‐developed in this field with little empirical evidence about the recommending behaviour of small business customers and referral groups. The case study of an independent health club reported here illustrates how these processes can be researched and the results used to influence word of mouth recommendations. The owner‐manager of the club carried out some basic research on his customer base in order to identify the types of members who were most active in recommending the club, and the stimuli that led to recommendations being made. A key finding was that newer members were more likely to recommend than those who had been members for some time, contradicting the implications of relationship marketing theories that long standing customers generate most recommendations. Membership more than doubled following a number of activities designed to increase recommending behaviour. The most important stimuli to recommendations were believed to be involvement with the club, incentives and experiential factors. The case study indicates that word of mouth strategies benefit from research to find out which customers are recommending the business, what they are recommending about the business and what prompts them to do so.

The purpose of this paper is, first, to analyze the direct effects of the relationship chain “causal attributions and recovery efforts → satisfaction with service recovery → conventional and online word-of-mouth intentions” and, second, to study the moderating role of age in the relationship between satisfaction and subsequent word-of-mouth. Consumer assessment and behavior associated with service recovery is a topic of considerable interest for both academics and practitioners.

From an empirical perspective, this paper uses a sample of 336 individuals who experienced service failure at a retail store to estimate a structural equation model. Additionally, a multigroup analysis allows testing the existence of a moderating effect of age on the hypothesized relations.

Results allow to confirm the direct effects of causal attributions and recovery efforts on satisfaction with service recovery, and the impact of the latter, in turn, on conventional and online word-of-mouth intentions. Furthermore, the multigroup analysis reveals that age moderates the relationship between satisfaction and online word-of-mouth.

In service recovery situations, retailers should concentrate their efforts at providing evidence of the failure as temporary and inevitable as well as offering material or economic compensation.

This paper contributes to the identification of the most relevant variables influencing customer satisfaction with service recovery in a retail context. In addition to this, these results provide support to the importance of age on online word-of-mouth behavior.

This article aims to dispel the perception that academic libraries do not need to market their services and resources; to acquaint academic librarians to the concept of word‐of‐mouth marketing and its potential for academic libraries; and to share a word‐of‐mouth marketing academic library success story.

Includes an introduction to the concept of word‐of‐mouth marketing and its application to academic libraries. Also includes how one academic library successfully employed this marketing technique.

Provides an introduction to the word‐of‐mouth marketing strategy and its usefulness for academic libraries. Shares a real‐life success story of academic library word‐of‐mouth marketing.

Useful as an introduction for academic librarians to a specific type of marketing strategy that works well in a college/university setting and provides some successful techniques of word‐of‐mouth marketing for academic libraries.

Helps fill a void relative to using marketing strategies in an academic library setting and offers suggestions on how to do this successfully.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how information and communication technology (ICT) adoption in hotels contributes to satisfaction and loyalty from the consumer perspective, considering the online dimension of recommendations.

A quantitative research based on a structured questionnaire and using a personal survey method was developed. Surveys were conducted on 386 guests from Spanish hotels. Causal methodology by testing structural equation model was applied.

Significant relationships are obtained in the sequence “ICT use perception – satisfaction with ICT – overall satisfaction with the hotel – dimensions of loyalty” and the mediating effect of positive electronic word-of-mouth intention between ICT satisfaction and general intention to recommend the hotel is confirmed.

Future research can replicate these relationships in other tourist services and employ multidimensional scales to measure word-of-mouth behaviour.

The novelty of this work is that it studies the relationships between ICT, satisfaction and loyalty in hotel services, paying particular attention to positive word-of-mouth behaviour, both conventional and online.

El propósito de este trabajo es investigar la contribución que tiene la adopción de las TIC en los hoteles en la satisfacción y la lealtad, desde la perspectiva del consumidor y considerando la dimensión online de las recomendaciones.

Se desarrolló una investigación cuantitativa basada en un cuestionario estructurado y empleando el método de la encuesta personal. Se realizaron 386 encuestas a huéspedes de hoteles españoles. Se aplicó la metodología causal testando un modelo de ecuaciones estructurales.

Se obtienen relaciones significativas en la secuencia “percepción de los clientes del uso de las TIC – nivel de satisfacción con las TIC – nivel de satisfacción general con el hotel – dimensiones de la lealtad” y se confirma el efecto mediador que tiene la intención del boca-oreja online entre la satisfacción con las TIC y la intención general de recomendar el hotel.

En futuras investigaciones se pueden replicar estas relaciones en otros servicios turísticos y emplear escalas multidimensionales para medir la conducta de boca-oreja.

La novedad de este trabajo radica en el estudio de las relaciones entre las TIC, satisfacción y lealtad en los servicios hoteleros poniendo especial atención en la conducta de boca-oreja positivo, tanto convencional como online.