Opinion leadership and negative word-of-mouth communication

Abstract

Customers may feel negative emotion when they experience service failure. The negative emotion may induce unsatisfactory customers to spread negative word-of-mouths (WOM). However, not all unsatisfactory will spread negative WOM. The current study conducted an experimental design to explore the influence of opinion leadership tendency to negative word-of-mouth communication intention. The results revealed that customers will spread negative WOMs when the service failure is serious. However, when the service failure is minor, customers with a higher opinion leadership tendency are with higher intention to spread negative WOMs. The findings of the current are useful in exploring the role of opinion leadership tendency in negative WOM communication.