Quality (philosophy)

Marketing

Philosophy

Neuroscience

Service (business)

Word of mouth

Mediation

Business

Physics

Service quality

Advertising

Psychology

Loyalty business model

Optics

Epistemology

Sociology

Focus (optics)

Loyalty

Perception

Social science

Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services

In the service industry, word of mouth (WOM) has become an important indicator for influencing customer behaviour and developing marketing strategies. The current study develops a new theoretical model to analyse the moderating mechanism of electronic WOM, and further considers a multiple mediation analysis of how service innovation may influence in-person word of mouth (WOM) through service quality and brand loyalty. The results show that managers need to focus on WOM to improve customer service quality perception and encourage revisits. A study of 939 customers of a famous hotpot restaurant provides supporting evidence for this moderated mediation analysis. This study also discusses how this intriguing design of moderated mediation could be clarified using regulatory focus theory and further literature.

The multiple effects of service innovation and quality on transitional and electronic word-of-mouth in predicting customer behaviour