Three surveys, each covering two categories, were used to investigate the decay in WOM output after product experience. The categories were restaurants, fashion stores, hotels, holiday destinations, mobile phones and films. Data were gathered in the UK and Thailand, resulting in a total of 548 usable responses.
Word-of-mouth (WOM) output decays rapidly after product experience and then flattens. There is substantial variation by category. The decay rates of positive and negative word of mouth (PWOM, NWOM) are much the same, indicating that ratio measures of the volumes of PWOM to NWOM will be largely independent of the interval over which they are measured.
This evidence on WOM decay is useful to those estimating the financial return from new customers and indicates that incentivised referral should be concentrated in the short interval after product experience if it is to draw advantage from the high rate of WOM found at this time. More generally, it is argued that decay in the output of WOM must be studied by consumer researchers if the effect of WOM is to be properly measured and modelled.
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