Objective Successful development of tourism in many tourism destinations around the world depends on how to manage tourists’ perceptions by marketing managers and tourism planners. Thus, any information source about the tourists is of high importance that can be used to affect their beliefs towards the religious destinations. Therefore, it is important to identify the formation of such percept...

Organisations are continually seeking new ways to achieve competitive advantage and wordof-mouth (WOM) represents such an opportunity. However, little research has addressed differences in the content and style of positive and negative WOM. This study explores this issue through a series of six focus groups and 103 critical incidents surveys with 54 respondents. Results indicated that, when com...

Brands and word-of-mouth are cornerstones of marketing. Yet, their relationship has received relatively little attention. This study aims to enhance our understanding of brand characteristics as antecedents of WOM by executing a comprehensive empirical analysis. For this purpose, we constructed a unique data set on online and offline WOM and characteristics for over 600 of the most talked-about...

Consumers consistently resort to online Word-of-Mouth (WOM) in online shopping, thanks to the reach of the Internet and various web tools. Nevertheless, they are confronting relatively different levels of search costs for WOM information available on the Internet, depending on the distribution of WOM across websites. This study investigates the sales impacts of dispersion of WOM volume and vari...

Online word-of-mouth (WOM) has been recognized as an important information source in influencing consumer purchase decisions in literature. WOM can influence product sales through both awareness effect and persuasive effect. The explosive growth of social media which allows the creation and exchange of user-generated content (including WOM) is changing the way consumers search for information a...

Word of mouth (WOM) is an important component of a complex and dynamic marketplace environment, and as such, WOM research is best undertaken as part of a holistic research program. Five principles describing the operation of WOM are discussed, supported by data, and examples drawn from recent research studies. Complexity science modeling is introduced as an effective method for simulating the r...

This paper investigates the design and application of write-once memory (WOM) codes for flash memory storage. Using ideas from Merkx [1], we present a construction of WOM codes based on finite Euclidean geometries over F2. This construction yields WOM codes with new parameters and provides insight into the criterion that incidence structures should satisfy to give rise to good codes. We also an...

The authors study the effects of word-of-mouth (WOM) marketing on member growth at an Internet social networking site. Because such sites track the electronic invitations sent out by existing members, outbound WOM may be precisely tallied daily and then linked to the number of new members joining the site (signups). To handle the potential endogeneity among WOM, new signups, and traditional mar...

Free sampling of information goods has become a common business practice in expectation of reducing consumers’ uncertainty of product quality and helping product diffusion, yet receiving limited investigation of how consumers process free sampling and online word-of-mouth (WOM) and its consequences on retail sales. In this research, we examine the impact of free sampling of information goods on...

This paper investigates the effects of word of mouth (WOM) through microblogging and third-party platforms on the box office revenue of a movie and the moderating role of movie popularity. The study uses a two-year panel data set of 147 movies, tweets from 120 thousand randomly selected users of Sina Weibo, and reviews from Douban.com discussing these movies in their release period and finds th...