参照群体对正面口碑效果的调节作用

学术界和业界大多认为正面口碑能产生正面营销效果。然而,营销实践案例发现,当目标消费者对口碑发布者的社会认同感较低时,正面口碑可能会产生负面效果。文章结合社会认同理论,分析了该现象背后可能的心理机制,同时提出参照群体会对正面口碑产生不同的调节效应,并设计了实证模型对其进行检验。文章弥补了现有理论的不足,并为企业提出了相关建议:企业应该了解正面口碑可能因参照群体而产生负面效果及其背后的心理机制;企业可以通过大数据进行个性化的口碑营销和系统化管理口碑的方式来避免正面口碑产生负面效果;同时,企业还可以基于网络社区进行社会化营销,利用网络社区中的社会认同感提升网络营销的效果。

Academic circles and the industry mostly think positive word-of-mouth(WOM)can produce positive marketing effect.However,marketing practice shows that positive word-of-mouth(WOM)may have negative effects when the target consumers have a low social identity to the publisher of word of mouth.Based on the theory of social identity,this paper analyzes the possible psychological mechanism behind this phenomenon,and points out that the reference group will have different effects on positive word of mouth,and designs an empirical model to test it.The paper makes up for the deficiency of the existing theories,and puts forward some relevant suggestions for the enterprises that enterprises should understand the negative effects of the positive word of mouth and the psychological mechanism behind it because of the reference group;enterprises could avoid the negative effects of positive word of mouth by means of individualized word-of-mouth marketing and systematic management of word-of-mouth by big data;and at the same time,enterprises could also carry out social marketing based on the network community and use the social identity in the network community to promote the effect of network marketing.