{"title":"EXPRESS: Referral Contagion: Downstream Benefits of Customer Referrals","authors":"Rachel Gershon, Zhenling Jiang","doi":"10.1177/00222437241257886","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Companies often invest in referral reward programs to incentivize their current customers to spread word-of-mouth. Previous work has documented that referred customers tend to be more valuable than non-referred customers through their purchases or engagement with the company. We propose a previously overlooked benefit of encouraging referrals – referred customers are also more valuable because they make more referrals. Using a large-scale field dataset, we show that referred customers make 31-57% more referrals than non-referred customers conditional on purchase activities. Using preregistered lab experiments, we replicate the main effect and propose one underlying mechanism: referred customers perceive referring to be more socially appropriate than non-referred customers. In a field experiment, we build on previous work on norm salience and show that reminding referred customers that they joined through a referral further boosts their referral likelihood by 21%. These results advance our understanding of the social motives that contribute to referral decisions and illustrate that promoting referrals is substantially more valuable than previously estimated.","PeriodicalId":48465,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Marketing Research","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":5.1000,"publicationDate":"2024-05-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Journal of Marketing Research","FirstCategoryId":"91","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00222437241257886","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"BUSINESS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Companies often invest in referral reward programs to incentivize their current customers to spread word-of-mouth. Previous work has documented that referred customers tend to be more valuable than non-referred customers through their purchases or engagement with the company. We propose a previously overlooked benefit of encouraging referrals – referred customers are also more valuable because they make more referrals. Using a large-scale field dataset, we show that referred customers make 31-57% more referrals than non-referred customers conditional on purchase activities. Using preregistered lab experiments, we replicate the main effect and propose one underlying mechanism: referred customers perceive referring to be more socially appropriate than non-referred customers. In a field experiment, we build on previous work on norm salience and show that reminding referred customers that they joined through a referral further boosts their referral likelihood by 21%. These results advance our understanding of the social motives that contribute to referral decisions and illustrate that promoting referrals is substantially more valuable than previously estimated.
期刊介绍:
JMR is written for those academics and practitioners of marketing research who need to be in the forefront of the profession and in possession of the industry"s cutting-edge information. JMR publishes articles representing the entire spectrum of research in marketing. The editorial content is peer-reviewed by an expert panel of leading academics. Articles address the concepts, methods, and applications of marketing research that present new techniques for solving marketing problems; contribute to marketing knowledge based on the use of experimental, descriptive, or analytical techniques; and review and comment on the developments and concepts in related fields that have a bearing on the research industry and its practices.