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Word-of-Mouth

To what extent influences Word-of-Mouth, in the field of music, the receiver's purchase intentions?

Word-of-Mouth wisdom:

6.6 Future Research

The limitations of this study include the context in which the theory was tested and the structure of the study. Future research should investigate these issues in other contexts. The music context is common enough to ensure a reasonable test of the theory, but other contexts may provide additional insights. The study reported here was not extended over time, and thus it was not able to investigate some aspects of the recommendation-based decision process. For instance, decision makers might seek recommendations regarding other information sources, or perhaps a decision maker's level of objective or subjective knowledge may chance during the process of seeking information sources and considering the purchase.

Although I addressed two important aspects of construct validity (i.e., convergent and discriminant validity), an important and interesting venue for future research would be to assess how eWOM is connected to other relevant constructs. Examples of variables that would be interesting to link to eWOM from both a practical and a theoretical perspective include: behavioral intentions and share of wallet. Besides addressing the causal links between eWOM and other constructs it also necessary to examine whether these causal links vary as a function of customer characteristics and situational characteristics.

A particularly interesting question for future research is whether or not more senders are perceived to have less influence by receivers than by the senders themselves because senders overestimate their influence or because receivers underestimate actual seekers influence. Furthermore, Herr et al. (1991) suggest that negative attribute information can reduce or eliminate the effects of eWOM. Thus, future research should be designed to parse the effects of both positive and negative information.

The importance of eWOM behaviour in influencing consumer purchase requires that researchers in this area continue to broaden their methodologies beyond reliance on reports of past behaviour, the use of single focal products, and receiver-only data. In addition, a better understanding of the differing roles of perceptual and demographic homophily will also increase knowledge and understanding of eWOM. Future research should also consider eWOM in which information is exchanged under less purposeful information-seeking conditions (i.e., when product information exchange arises in the course of casual conversations, as conceptualized by Bone, 1992).

Another fruitful future research would be to replicate this study in parallel in different countries or over time. I expect that cultural differences in dimensions such as motivation, opportunity, ability, trust or social power should affect differently the roles of each of these factors in the eWOM process, and hence demonstrate how cultural differences affect the antecedents of influence of an eWOM. Such replication would enlighten our understanding of eWOM in an international context. Combined with studies over an extended time, such research could unearth both inherent cultural differences as well as the evolution of the processes that underlay eWOM.

This leads to another important issue in terms of the management of eWOM: the relationship between the online and the offline worlds. In this thesis, I investigated the influence of eWOM on receiver's purchase intentions (on-or offline). This suggests that (a) people make offline decisions based on online information, or that (b) online conversations may be a proxy for offline conversations. While (a) is not a surprise, the suggestion that the impact of eWOM crosses worlds implies that the manager has the option of creating eWOM or traditional WOM. Future research to understand better the relationships between eWOM and sales across these worlds would be valuable. A more general analysis of the implications of (b) would also be of great value: To what extent is eWOM similar to or different from traditional WOM? This would help, for example, to create eWOM strategies and to drive data collection decisions.

Last but not least, this thesis raises several important ethical issues. Consumers’ decisions to participate in online communities is undoubtedly made without the consideration that firms may be observing these conversations and drawing inferences from them. This differs from traditional market research measurement techniques in which the consumer gives approval for use of the data.