Reappraising Effects of Word-of-Mouth Communication on the Innovation Diffusion Process: An Abstract

Abstract

Since the digital revolution, the internet and mobile communication now play a crucial role in marketing. Consumers are both more informed and more skeptical than before, which has transformed the way a company implements its marketing strategies and the patterns used to study consumer behaviors. These behaviors took shape under the influence of traditional marketing tools, such as offline advertising, promotional activities, and personal selling (Kimmel and Kitchen 2014). Because of the advancement of technology, mainly social media’s role in marketing communication, marketers can reach consumers more easily, but they are less influential to those customers (Kimmel and Kitchen 2014). The level of trustworthiness improves dramatically for unknown consumers if the information’s source is from a trusted website. Because eWOM is written, it is more permanent than traditional WOM, which explains why an increasing number of firms now use social networks as their marketing platforms (Brown et al. 2007; eMarketer 2012). People store a previous response to a stimulus as a cognitive representation that can be retrieved for subsequent decisions. The available information at the moment that people decide to pursue their goals determines how people process information, including processes such as information encoding, organization, storage, and retrieval (Wyer and Srull 1986). This study argues whether or not previous marketing communication theories hold dependent upon specific contexts. The negativity effect of eWOM will be illustrated in the early and late majority consumer groups; however, negativity effect is inconsistent in the old adopter groups, which gives the weight that the negativity effect is context- and product-specific. The study demonstrates that the effectiveness of eWOM varies among different groups of people over various timelines, congruous with the elaboration likelihood theory. This finding also indicates that marketers should employ different marketing strategies at different stages of the innovation diffusion process to maximize the efficiency of their marketing investments.