Word-of-mouth: The use of source expertise in the evaluation of familiar and unfamiliar brands

This research was designed to expand the understanding of how brand familiarity may affect the motivation to process word-of-mouth (WOM) information in brand evaluation. The pre-WOM brand attitude certainty is expected to explain the moderation effect. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Two experiments were conducted. The study participants were undergraduate students from a major university in Singapore. The main statistical analysis was done using a two-way analysis of covariance.

The results of Experiments 1 and 2 support the prediction that consumers are more likely to use the perceived expertise of the WOM sender to evaluate an unfamiliar brand vs a familiar brand. Experiment 2 also provides some preliminary evidence that this interaction effect may be due to the difference in certainty of the study respondents in regards to the pre-WOM evaluation of unfamiliar and familiar brand.

This manipulation method of presenting WOM in a printed format may understate the impact of WOM. A more vivid manipulation of WOM that allows for a feedback loop may be considered for future research.

The results highlight the importance of considering the strength dimensions of brand attitudes (e.g. attitude certainty) in the marketplace. For marketers of unfamiliar brands, source factors (e.g. expertise of WOM sender) are important to consider for effective use of WOM to market their products. For familiar brands, source factors are less relevant.

This paper highlights the importance of considering attitude certainty and the subsequent malleability of attitude toward new information about the brand in the marketplace. Hence, marketers and researchers who are interested in changing brand attitude should take meta-attitude factors into consideration.