Marketers often try to stimulate WOM through referrals or seeding programs that involve giving consumers incentives if they generate WOM. But incentivizing WOM can sometimes backfire by hampering consumers’ willingness to share. This Journal of Marketing study explores how marketers can fuel positive WOM without using explicit incentives. In this webinar, the authors show that commonly used marketing perks (e.g., gifts, benefits, and rewards) can effectively foster WOM if they are framed in a way that lowers their perceived contractuality—the perception that customers earn such perks by engaging in specific behaviors dictated by a company. Marketers can influence this perception of a perk with easily implementable pivots, such as reducing the restrictiveness of a perk, reducing the salience of a perk’s contingencies, or framing a perk as a gift from the company rather than a prize earned through a customer’s effort.
Full Journal of Marketing article: https://doi.org/10.1177/0022242921991798
Read the Scholarly Insight for this article here.
