The Measurement of Word-of-Mouth Communication and an Investigation of Service Quality and Customer Commitment As Potential Antecedents

Abstract

The current research systematically develops and empirically validates a scale to measure word-of-mouth communication and investigates two forms of customer commitment and service quality as potential antecedents. The findings support the hypotheses that affective commitment is positively related to word-of-mouth communication but that high sacrifice commitment is not related to word-of-mouth communication. Interestingly, the effect of service quality on word-of-mouth communication appears to be industry dependent. A distinction is made between word-of-mouth activity and word-of-mouth praise.