Communicating customer references on industrial companies' Web sites

Customer references are important marketing tools for companies operating in industrial markets. This paper reports on an exploratory case study examining how six industrial companies communicate about their customer references on their Web sites, by using qualitative content and discourse analysis as methods for analyzing the data. The existing research on customer reference utilization and concepts related to it, such as word-of-mouth behavior and referrals in industrial markets are reviewed and the specific features of Web-based reference utilization are discussed. The empirical data consists of 165 reference descriptions gathered from the case companies' Web sites. The findings show that the case companies' reference descriptions tend to focus on describing individual product/project deliveries, and a certain structure and repetitive themes can be identified in the descriptions. Three discourses that the case companies use to present their customer references were identified: Discourse of Benefits, Discourse of Relationship Commitment, and Discourse of Technological Expertise. Implications of the findings for practitioners and for theory development are discussed.