The decay of positive and negative word of mouth after product experience

• After product experience, the output of word of mouth (WOM) decays rapidly with a half life of less than a week.
• This has implications for measures of customer value, incentivised referral, sales outcomes and diffusion modelling.
• The decay rates of positive and negative WOM (PWOM, NWOM) are similar, suggesting that these forms of WOM have similar bases.

Three surveys, each covering two categories, were used to investigate the decay in WOM output after product experience. The categories were restaurants, fashion stores, hotels, holiday destinations, mobile phones and films. Data were gathered in the UK and Thailand, resulting in a total of 548 usable responses.Word-of-mouth (WOM) output decays rapidly after product experience and then flattens. There is substantial variation by category. The decay rates of positive and negative word of mouth (PWOM, NWOM) are much the same, indicating that ratio measures of the volumes of PWOM to NWOM will be largely independent of the interval over which they are measured.This evidence on WOM decay is useful to those estimating the financial return from new customers and indicates that incentivised referral should be concentrated in the short interval after product experience if it is to draw advantage from the high rate of WOM found at this time. More generally, it is argued that decay in the output of WOM must be studied by consumer researchers if the effect of WOM is to be properly measured and modelled.

Chinese abstract采用三项调查对试用产品后的口碑结果衰减进行了探讨，每项调查涵盖两个类别。这些类别是餐馆、时装商店、酒店、度假胜地、移动电话和电影。这些数据是在英国和泰国收集的，总共获得548份有效答卷。试用产品后的口碑结果迅速趋于平淡，然后是无关痛痒的平铺直叙。各个类别的口碑结果差异很大。正面和负面口碑（正面口碑、负面口碑）大致相同，表明正面和负面口碑数量的定比测量将很大程度上独立于时间间隔的测量。口碑衰减证据对新客户的财务回报预估是有用的，并指出试用产品后短期内应关注那些有利口碑，才能从这次发现的较高口碑中获得好处。从更为广泛的意义上来看，有人认为，消费者研究人员必须研究口碑结果的衰减是否对口碑效应进行了适当的测量和模型预测。