Resumen de The firms management of word or mouth communications. Insights and opportunities for marketers
This thesis contains three separate essays that deal with the firm's management of word of mouth. In the first essay, "Marketing expenditures and word of mouth communication:complements or substitutes?", I examine the extent which word-of-muth communication (WOM) plays a complementary and/or substitute role with regard to advertising. A review of existing literature reveals the main similarities and differences between these constructs, and the study determines the conditions in which a social contagion process is most likely. Specifically, this investigation analyzes whether WOM complements advertising: however, three marketing strategies-viral marketing, referral reward programs, and a firm's creation of exogenous WOM might in theory work without advertising. This article concludes with a list of unanswered questions of potential interest to both researchers and managers.
In the second essay I check how the interplay between WOM and other communications channels affect supply and demand of movies during the opening week.
Finally in the third essay I propose a model to assess the value of customer referral activity. This article proposes a new methodology to estimate CRV using social network analysis in the model design and event history analysis in the statistical validation. Compared with other methodologies that measure customer¿s recommendation value, I show that this proposed approach is more robust, flexible and easy to implement, and it accurately reflects the role of social interactions in influencing the likelihood that people recommend.
