[Keywords:] word-of-mouth communication word-of-mouth marketing concept discrimination
In recent years, word-of-mouth marketing has been sought after by more and more researchers and practitioners. However, in the complicated process of word-of-mouth marketing channels, people often confuse word-of-mouth, word-of-mouth communication and word-of-mouth marketing indiscriminately. The author believes that this is not conducive to the development of word-of-mouth marketing, not conducive to mining the explicit and implicit value of customers in the consumption process from a quantitative point of view, and not conducive to doing a good job in customer identification in word-of-mouth marketing. Therefore, this paper discusses these three key concepts in detail and puts forward a framework for effectively identifying and managing customers in word-of-mouth marketing.
First, the connotation and category analysis of word of mouth
Word of mouth has many other names, such as ideological virus, virus marketing, gospel spread, people's verbal praise, opinions, oral idioms circulating in society and so on. Word of mouth is an important marketing tool that affects customers' judgment and purchase behavior, and it is also one of the important sources for customers to obtain information. In addition, with the rapid development of Internet and e-commerce, the word-of-mouth of customers can spread more quickly and widely.
Rosen believes: "Word of mouth is all comments about the brand, and it is the sum of all people's oral communication about a particular product, service or company". He also pointed out that word of mouth is different from traditional marketing methods, and word of mouth has changed the focus of marketing again, from the relationship between individual customers to the interaction between customers.
Domestic scholars usually equate word-of-mouth with customer recommendation, which refers to information about an institution's credit and reliability, operation mode and service. It can spread from one customer to another through mutual communication among the public, forming a long-term, unified and stable view of a product or service. It can't come from a certain purchase or service, but the result of long-term efforts of enterprises. Good reputation and word of mouth are the fundamental guarantee for enterprises to obtain customers for a long time.
For comparison, the author thinks that word-of-mouth can be simply understood as customers' personal views, comments or opinions on enterprise products, brands, services or information.
Word of mouth can be divided into positive WOM and negative WOM. Arndt pointed out that positive word-of-mouth often increases corporate profitability, while negative word-of-mouth often decreases corporate profitability. Reichheld and others confirmed that positive word-of-mouth can not only reduce marketing expenses, but also increase the income and return of new customers. Singer pointed out that negative word-of-mouth often leads to customer complaints, and Solomon further confirmed that negative word-of-mouth will reduce the reliability of corporate advertising. Therefore, in this sense, word-of-mouth recommendation is a double-edged sword. Enterprises should make full use of the positive "amplifier effect" of word-of-mouth recommendation to reduce negative word-of-mouth, thus increasing customer lifetime value and shareholder value.
Second, analyze the connotation and characteristics of word-of-mouth communication.
Communication is one of the most basic concepts in communication science. Different scholars have different views, forming academic views such as sharing theory, communication theory, influence theory and symbolism. The core of communication is that the disseminator exerts influence on the disseminated people by intentionally controlling the content of communication. Combining the definitions of word-of-mouth and communication, the author thinks that word-of-mouth communication refers to the process of "when customers have a relationship with a certain enterprise, product, brand or service, passing the word-of-mouth of a certain product or service to other customers through mutual communication and recitation between customers."
In addition, many scholars have given different definitions of word-of-mouth communication.
Anderson defines word-of-mouth communication as "informal communication of opinions about products and services between individuals, including positive opinions and negative opinions, but it is different from formal complaints or praises to the company." Kennedy said: "Word-of-mouth communication refers to any information exchange between consumers, from chatting between friends or neighbors to consulting the results of consumer surveys published by the public." He Xu believes: "Word-of-mouth communication refers to the informal interpersonal communication between non-commercial communicators and recipients about the perceived information of products, brands, organizations and services." From the above definition, we can see that word-of-mouth communication mainly has four characteristics:
First, compared with other communication channels, the most typical feature of word-of-mouth communication is to spread through informal channels and interact with customers in two ways. Filser pointed out that word-of-mouth communication is one of the most important informal communication tools between customers, and it is a real two-way communication.
Second, both the disseminator and the receiver are customers and have no economic interests with the enterprise. Spreading information is more objective, reliable and credible than information obtained from other marketing channels (such as advertising and sponsorship).
Third, it is beneficial to reduce the perceived risk of customers, reduce the serious "information asymmetry" problem between customers and enterprises, and provide reference for potential customers to understand the value and future risks of goods, especially for expensive goods.
Fourth, word-of-mouth communication is intangible and not controlled by enterprises. Moreover, in different industries, customers' willingness to spread is different, which leads to different growth rates of potential customers. Word-of-mouth communication can subconsciously affect other customers' cognitive patterns, reduce the random fluctuations and losses of corporate cash flow, and increase corporate value.
Third, the connotation and significance of word-of-mouth marketing analysis
The so-called word-of-mouth marketing is a two-way interactive communication behavior in which individuals other than producers and sellers convey information about a specific product, brand, manufacturer, seller and any organization or individual that can remind people of the above-mentioned objects through express or implied means, so that the recommended person can obtain information, change his attitude and even affect his purchase behavior without being processed by a third party. It can be simply understood as "a marketing method in which the buyer transmits the relevant information of the goods to the buyer's family, friends and people who have contacts in work and life through word of mouth", that is, any marketing method through word of mouth can be called word-of-mouth marketing.
It can be seen that the purpose of word-of-mouth marketing is to meet customer needs, win customer satisfaction and customer loyalty, gain positive word-of-mouth, establish good relations with customers, and improve the corporate and brand image. In order to achieve this goal, enterprises should have a comprehensive and clear strategic deployment before carrying out word-of-mouth marketing. That is to say, when making the strategic goal and positioning of word-of-mouth marketing, we need to consider the influence of customer heterogeneity and risk, the difference of customer value brought by positive word-of-mouth and negative word-of-mouth, the combination of long-term, medium-term and short-term word-of-mouth marketing strategies, and the influence of channel members, opinion leaders, media, competitors and customers in advance. By exchanging roles with customers, we can form an executable, controllable, measurable and easy-to-understand word-of-mouth marketing channel.
Fourthly, effectively identify and manage customers in word-of-mouth marketing.
Word-of-mouth marketing is conducive to corporate profits, improve the recovery rate of working capital and the realization rate of fixed assets, prolong the life cycle of transactions between customers and enterprises, reduce the turnover rate of customers, increase CLV, and help enterprises stand out from the fierce competition and form brand assets); Corporate. It is conducive to the internal cultural construction of the enterprise, forming a satisfied, loyal, tenacious and efficient team, and making the enterprise recognized by more and more customers.
However, with the rapid development of economy, enterprises must complete the strategic transformation from transaction-oriented to relationship-oriented, in order to gain a sustainable competitive advantage in the fierce market competition. Theoretically speaking, it is important to establish good relations with customers, but the resources of enterprises are limited, so it is unrealistic to require enterprises to establish relations with all customers. In addition, there are many uncertainties, which may lead to the sunk cost of the funds invested by enterprises in maintaining the relationship with customers. Once the relationship with customers breaks down, the investment loses its value. Therefore, in the process of complex marketing channels, how to identify which customers are the key customers of the enterprise and how to allocate limited resources to the right customers, we need to calculate the customer lifetime value (CLV) to explore the hidden value of customers in the consumption process. Therefore, in word-of-mouth marketing, it is also necessary to use the idea of CLV to effectively identify and manage customers, so as to help managers make decisions. Stahl, H.K. and others put forward a conceptual model of combining CLV with shareholder value (SHV), and put forward five principles that should be satisfied in accurately evaluating CLV, which is worth learning. Considering the heterogeneity among customers, the differences in word-of-mouth recommendation willingness and word-of-mouth recommendation value, the horizontal axis is divided according to the strength of word-of-mouth recommendation, and the vertical axis is divided according to whether the word-of-mouth recommendation value is greater than zero, thus dividing customers into four categories: the positive word-of-mouth value generated by positive recommendation is getting less and less, and the negative word-of-mouth value generated by negative recommendation is getting less and less. Moreover, customers with positive word-of-mouth recommendation value are better than customers with negative word-of-mouth recommendation value, regardless of recommendation value. For customers with negative word-of-mouth recommendation, it will often cause intangible losses to enterprises and hinder the purchase of other potential customers, so we should pay special attention to customers with negative word-of-mouth recommendation. Enterprises should listen carefully to the complaints of problem customers, especially those with more negative word-of-mouth values, identify the problems, prescribe the right medicine, try their best to eliminate their dissatisfaction, resolve their grievances, avoid their negative influence, further boldly innovate and explore new business opportunities.
Verb (abbreviation of verb) conclusion
In a word, word of mouth is a special intangible resource owned by enterprises. Word-of-mouth communication helps customers simplify the decision-making process and shorten the time to make a purchase decision. Word-of-mouth marketing helps enterprises to increase sales, reduce the cost of acquiring new customers, relationship costs and maintenance costs, and increase company profits. Therefore, the three concepts of word-of-mouth, word-of-mouth communication and word-of-mouth marketing are related and different, and cannot be used equally, let alone exchanged at will. We need to choose according to different purposes, and at the same time, we need to accurately identify key customers in word-of-mouth marketing and strengthen management.