Word of Mouth has always played an important role in addressing con- sumers ‘decision making about the purchasing of products and services. Moreo- ver it represents one of the main demonstrations of customer’s empowerment, through which consumers can provide a direct feedback to other consumers about a previous experience with a product exerting a power over the company. WOM has increased in volume thanks to the advent of Internet, with the prolifer- ation of User Generated Contents and online communities. Within this context the purpose of this paper is to investigate the behaviour of Generation Y within the online context compared to the offline environment, understanding the activ- ity and the motivations of WOM generation and wide spreading. In particular we focused on positive WOM. Empirical data were collected from 223 students through a nationwide survey considering those people who were member of Fa- cebook fan pages of Italian universities. Data collection was realized on January 2014 and a link to the survey was supplied within these fan pages. Participants were asked to fill in questions about the evaluation of the intention to wide- spread word of mouth in the online and in the offline contexts and the motiva- tions leading them when providing WOM. Data analysis was conducted through descriptive statistics and two linear regression models. Results show that the ma- jority of respondents have shared their travel experience in the last few months. Relating to which context they preferred to share their opinion, the average in- tention to share the opinion in the UGC platform is 4.98 to 7 point Likert scale. This is less than the average mean of the willingness to widespread WOM in the traditional context, with a 6.06 to 7 average mean. Regarding the motivations, we found that the main drivers that lead respondents to provide their travel experi- ence to others are mainly related to leisure and entertainment motivation and to advice/help other customers. This is true for both traditional word of mouth WOM and eWOM. However for the former the average means are higher com- pared with the means of the latter. In this study the focus was on a specific indus- try in only one country so there is the need to replicate the study in other countries and industries. The results presented in the paper have important implica- tions for researchers when modelling and measuring consumer behaviour and empowerment within the online context. Traditional versus innovative word of mouth were investigated and compared, exploring the main motivations that lead consumers to talk about tourism products.
Why do People Talk? A Comparison Between Offline WOM and Online WOM
CONFENTE, Ilenia;RUSSO, IVAN
2015-01-01
Abstract
Word of Mouth has always played an important role in addressing con- sumers ‘decision making about the purchasing of products and services. Moreo- ver it represents one of the main demonstrations of customer’s empowerment, through which consumers can provide a direct feedback to other consumers about a previous experience with a product exerting a power over the company. WOM has increased in volume thanks to the advent of Internet, with the prolifer- ation of User Generated Contents and online communities. Within this context the purpose of this paper is to investigate the behaviour of Generation Y within the online context compared to the offline environment, understanding the activ- ity and the motivations of WOM generation and wide spreading. In particular we focused on positive WOM. Empirical data were collected from 223 students through a nationwide survey considering those people who were member of Fa- cebook fan pages of Italian universities. Data collection was realized on January 2014 and a link to the survey was supplied within these fan pages. Participants were asked to fill in questions about the evaluation of the intention to wide- spread word of mouth in the online and in the offline contexts and the motiva- tions leading them when providing WOM. Data analysis was conducted through descriptive statistics and two linear regression models. Results show that the ma- jority of respondents have shared their travel experience in the last few months. Relating to which context they preferred to share their opinion, the average in- tention to share the opinion in the UGC platform is 4.98 to 7 point Likert scale. This is less than the average mean of the willingness to widespread WOM in the traditional context, with a 6.06 to 7 average mean. Regarding the motivations, we found that the main drivers that lead respondents to provide their travel experi- ence to others are mainly related to leisure and entertainment motivation and to advice/help other customers. This is true for both traditional word of mouth WOM and eWOM. However for the former the average means are higher com- pared with the means of the latter. In this study the focus was on a specific indus- try in only one country so there is the need to replicate the study in other countries and industries. The results presented in the paper have important implica- tions for researchers when modelling and measuring consumer behaviour and empowerment within the online context. Traditional versus innovative word of mouth were investigated and compared, exploring the main motivations that lead consumers to talk about tourism products.
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