Firm-Created Word-of-Mouth Communication: Evidence from a Field Test

In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of a firm's proactive management of customer-to-customer communication. We are particularly interested in understanding how, if at all, the firm should go about effecting meaningful word-of-mouth (WOM) communications. To tackle this problem, we collect data from two sources: (1) we implement a large-scale field test in which a national firm created word of mouth through two populations: customers and noncustomers, and (2) we collect data from an online experiment. We break our theoretical problem into two subproblems. First, we ask: “What kind of WOM drives sales?” Motivated by previous research, we hypothesize that for a product with a low initial awareness…