Construct · 4 fields · 6 citations
One name. Different field. Different construct. One map.
● jingle · one label, three objects Nearest construct by meaninginfluencecompare the meaningsEvery construct on the map is compared with every other by the meaning of its definitions, and the closest one is surfaced here. The nearest construct to word of mouth is influence.
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Informal, person-to-person talk between a communicator and a receiver about a brand, product, or service, where neither party has a commercial stake in the exchange. Arndt's 1967 Role of Product-Related Conversations in the Diffusion of a New Product was one of the first controlled studies of this influence, tracking how a household's decision to try a new product followed from conversations with neighbours. Brown and Reingen's 1987 Social Ties and Word-of-Mouth Referral Behavior showed that strong ties are more likely to be activated as sources and to sway a decision, while weak ties carry information across groups. The referent here is a live conversation between two people who know each other, measured by whether talk happened and whose talk mattered. It is not a review posted for strangers to read, nor a diffusion curve across a whole population.[1][2]
Any positive or negative statement made by a potential, actual, or former customer about a product or company that is made available to a multitude of people and institutions over the Internet. Hennig-Thurau, Gwinner, Walsh, and Gremler's 2004 Electronic Word-of-Mouth via Consumer-Opinion Platforms gave this definition and asked why people write reviews at all, finding motives such as concern for other consumers, a desire for social benefit, and the wish to help the company. The object is a written statement that persists on a platform and can be read by strangers long after it is posted, unlike a spoken remark that is gone as it is made. Because the audience is a multitude rather than an acquaintance, tie strength and the identity of the source often fall away, and volume and text take the place of the interpersonal bond. The same word covers this that covers a dyadic conversation, but the way it reaches an audience and how long the message lasts are different.[3]
In marketing analytics, word of mouth is treated as a measurable aggregate of consumer reviews, summarised by its valence, meaning how positive or negative the ratings are, and its volume, meaning how many there are, and studied for its effect on sales. Chevalier and Mayzlin's 2006 The Effect of Word of Mouth on Sales: Online Book Reviews compared the same titles across two retailers and found that an improvement in a book's reviews raised its relative sales, and that the length and content of reviews mattered, which suggests readers acted on the text and not only the star rating. Here the referent is not a conversation or a single readable review but a number pulled from many reviews and linked to a behavioural outcome. The unit of analysis is the product, not the pair of people, and the measure is a statistic over reviews rather than a report of who talked to whom. This object shares the label with interpersonal word of mouth but is a variable in a sales model, not an act of communication.[4]
In sociology and communication research, word of mouth is the interpersonal channel through which information and influence spread across a population, as against the direct reach of mass media. Katz's 1957 The Two-Step Flow of Communication restated the hypothesis, first advanced with Lazarsfeld, that ideas often flow from media to opinion leaders and from them to the wider public, so that personal influence sits between the message and its effect. In this tradition the object of study is a network process: who is connected to whom, how many steps a message takes, and how adoption builds up over time, a lineage this map follows on its pages for opinion-leadership and diffusion. The referent is neither a single conversation nor a review but the pattern of transmission across many linked people. Measuring it calls for network and time data, not a count of one dyad's talk.[5][6]
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