تبلیغات : محرک یا سرکوب کننده تبلیغات دهان به دهان آنلاین ؟

Word of mouth by consumers is attracting increased attention from marketing scholars because of findings that it can affect brand perceptions and sales. There is limited empirical research, however, on the stimulants of consumer word of mouth. An assumption in the literature has been that increased advertising can also stimulate consumer word of mouth and, hence, complement the effects of advertising. We present arguments for why increased advertising may be associated with reductions in online word of mouth. We empirically test this possibility on online word of mouth in the auto industry. Our results suggest that increased advertising can, indeed, be associated with reductions in online consumer word of mouth.

Word of mouth is generally defined as “informal communication among consumers about products and services” (Liu 2006). It can range from casual inter-personal conversations to consumer brand advocacy (Keller, 2007 and Park and MacInnis, 2006) where a consumer actively promotes the brand to other potential consumers. Today, however, word of mouth is also electronic and can happen in many ways such as “Web-based opinion platforms, discussion forums, boycott Web sites, news groups” (Hennig-Thurau et al. 2004) or “consumer-opinion platforms” (Hennig-Thurau et al. 2004). This online word of mouth (Hennig-Thurau et al. 2004) is thus “any positive or negative statement made by potential, actual, or former customers about a product or company, which is made available to a multitude of people and institutions via the Internet” (p 39). Regardless of what form it takes, however, the marketing literature suggests that word of mouth can play a significant role in influencing consumers' purchase behavior (Arndt, 1967, Brown and Reingen, 1987 and Chakravarty et al., 2010). In fact, some researchers (Day, 1971 and Katz and Lazarsfeld, 1955) have argued that word of mouth may have the most influence among all the sources of information that consumers turn to before making a purchase decision.

Word of mouth by consumers is attracting increased attention from marketing scholars because of findings that it can affect brand perceptions and sales (Liu, 2006, Chen and Xie, 2008 and Chakravarty et al., 2010). An assumption in the literature has been that increased advertising can also stimulate consumer word of mouth and, hence, complement the effects of advertising. However, our empirical analysis of word of mouth data related to cars from two different websites leads to a very different conclusion: that increased advertising spending by brands can be associated with reduced online word of mouth for products.