Asia Pacific Journal of Marketing and LogisticsWord-of-mouth: The use of source expertise in the evaluation of familiar and unfamiliarbrandsBoon Chong Lim Cindy M.Y. Chung

Article information:To cite this document:Boon Chong Lim Cindy M.Y. Chung , (2014),"Word-of-mouth", Asia Pacific Journal of Marketing andLogistics, Vol. 26 Iss 1 pp. 39 - 53Permanent link to this document:http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/APJML-02-2013-0027

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Users who downloaded this article also downloaded:Lars Groeger, Francis Buttle, (2014),"Word-of-mouth marketing: Towards an improved understanding ofmulti-generational campaign reach", European Journal of Marketing, Vol. 48 Iss 7/8 pp. 1186-1208 http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/EJM-02-2012-0086Jillian C. Sweeney, Geoffrey N. Soutar, Tim Mazzarol, (2012),"Word of mouth: measuring thepower of individual messages", European Journal of Marketing, Vol. 46 Iss 1/2 pp. 237-257 http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/03090561211189310Jan Ahrens, James R. Coyle, Michal Ann Strahilevitz, (2013),"Electronic word of mouth: The effects ofincentives on e-referrals by senders and receivers", European Journal of Marketing, Vol. 47 Iss 7 pp.1034-1051 http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/03090561311324192

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Word-of-mouthThe use of source expertise

in the evaluation of familiar and unfamiliarbrands

Boon Chong LimDivision of Marketing and International Business,

Nanyang Business School, Nanyang Technological University,Singapore, and

Cindy M.Y. ChungFaculty of Economics and Business Administration,

Marketing Department Goethe-Universitat, Frankfurt, Germany

Abstract

Purpose – This research was designed to expand the understanding of how brand familiarity mayaffect the motivation to process word-of-mouth (WOM) information in brand evaluation. Thepre-WOM brand attitude certainty is expected to explain the moderation effect. The paper aims todiscuss these issues.

Design/methodology/approach – Two experiments were conducted. The study participants wereundergraduate students from a major university in Singapore. The main statistical analysis was doneusing a two-way analysis of covariance.

Findings – The results of Experiments 1 and 2 support the prediction that consumers are more likelyto use the perceived expertise of the WOM sender to evaluate an unfamiliar brand vs a familiar brand.Experiment 2 also provides some preliminary evidence that this interaction effect may be due to thedifference in certainty of the study respondents in regards to the pre-WOM evaluation of unfamiliarand familiar brand.

Research limitations/implications – This manipulation method of presenting WOM in a printedformat may understate the impact of WOM. A more vivid manipulation of WOM that allows for afeedback loop may be considered for future research.

Practical implications – The results highlight the importance of considering the strengthdimensions of brand attitudes (e.g. attitude certainty) in the marketplace. For marketers of unfamiliarbrands, source factors (e.g. expertise of WOM sender) are important to consider for effective use ofWOM to market their products. For familiar brands, source factors are less relevant.

Originality/value – This paper highlights the importance of considering attitude certainty and thesubsequent malleability of attitude toward new information about the brand in the marketplace.Hence, marketers and researchers who are interested in changing brand attitude should takemeta-attitude factors into consideration.

Keywords Consumer behaviour, Word of mouth marketing

Paper type Research paper

The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at

www.emeraldinsight.com/1355-5855.htm

The authors thank Ringo Ho, Shun Yin Lam, and Sharon Ng, and participants in the 2010 GFAMarketing Conference for their valuable feedback on this research.

Received 10 February 2013Revised 29 August 2013Accepted 20 September

2013

Asia Pacific Journal of Marketing andLogistics

Vol. 26 No. 1, 2014pp. 39-53

q Emerald Group Publishing Limited1355-5855

DOI 10.1108/APJML-02-2013-0027

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1. IntroductionWord-of-mouth (WOM) is an informal mode of communication about the evaluation ofgoods and services between consumers who are independent of the marketers(Anderson, 1998; Arndt, 1967; Dichter, 1966; Wee et al., 1995). In the marketplace,WOM plays an important role in shaping consumers’ attitudes and behaviors (Brownand Reingen, 1987). Consumers search for information from other consumers to makemore informed decisions (Berger, 1988; Jolson and Bushman, 1978). Relevant others(e.g. friends and relatives) can provide information that supports and/or adds to whatthe consumers already know about the products and services (Deutsch and Gerard,1955; Lim and Chung, 2011).

The extent to which information from others affects the individual’s evaluation ofobjects depends on whether the individual perceives information about the product orservice from others to be credible or not (Burnkrant and Cousineau, 1975). Theexpertise of the source is one of the more important and enduring components of sourcecredibility (Yoon et al., 1998). Since the impact of WOM is contingent on whetherconsumers view WOM messages as credible, the perceived expertise of WOM sender islikely to be an important factor in the study of WOM. Even though the WOM sender islikely to be trustworthy and does not have any ulterior motive to provide the WOM(Bansal and Voyer, 2000; Smith et al., 2005), he/she may not have the expertise toprovide valid information about the object in question. Thus, how the perceivedexpertise of WOM sender can influence the impact of the WOM on the evaluation ofbrands is an important consideration. However, the motivation to use the additionalinformation from the WOM sender (including the sender’s characteristics) may bedependent on the characteristics of the focal brand. The impact of brand informationon subsequent information processing is expected to be moderated by the consumers’familiarity with the brand. Past research has extensively looked into how productfamiliarity (i.e. prior knowledge of the product category) (Rao and Monroe, 1988) caninfluence cue utilization due to the consumers’ ability to process additional information.However, brand familiarity does not necessarily lead to better-developed knowledgestructures (i.e. schemas) about a product category. Today, many marketers use brandextensions across numerous product categories to leverage on their strong brandsleading to greater awareness. Brand familiarity can also arise from marketingcommunication that focuses on raising brand awareness and reasons for buying thefocal brand, but consumers may not gain much product knowledge from commercialmessages. Therefore, brand familiarity, as opposed to product familiarity, may affectthe processing of additional information in a different way.

This research examines how brand familiarity can affect the motivation of theconsumers to use the expertise heuristic (e.g. consumers who are experts can be trustedto give an accurate reflection of brand quality) in a WOM exchange context. This paperexamines this expected moderation by delineating the meta-attitude factors(e.g. attitude certainty) of consumers in this context. This paper highlights theimportance of considering attitude certainty and the subsequent malleability ofattitude toward familiar or unfamiliar brand to new information in the marketplace.

The results of the two experiments in this research support this prediction.Experiment 2 also provides some preliminary evidence that the moderation effect ofbrand familiarity on the use of the source expertise as cue may be driven by thecertainty the study participants have about their pre-WOM evaluation of a familiar

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brand versus an unfamiliar brand. The conceptual and marketing implications of theresults are discussed in the concluding section of this paper.

2. Conceptual background and hypothesis development2.1 Attitude certainty and brand familiarityBrand name information can be considered a knowledge structure that can operate as ajudgment heuristic. The knowledge structure may include associations between abrand name and the quality of the product and therefore provide a basis for a judgmentor a decision without the need for extensive processing of internal cues (i.e. specificinformation about product attributes) (Campbell et al., 2003; Maheswaran et al., 1992).In contrast to heuristics that provide information about message validity, brand nameprovides information about the attitude object itself (i.e. quality of the product) ratherthan the position that the persuasive message advocates. Consumers often use price orbrand information in making judgments about products, and this attention to brandand price information may inhibit the use of later (potentially more diagnostic)information in judging a product’s quality (Oxoby and Finnigan, 2007). However,attitude certainty is likely to affect the use of brand name as a judgment heuristic bythe consumers.

Recent research on persuasion and resistance of persuasion has looked beyond justattitude and focused on the impact of attitude strength, such as attitude certainty(Barden and Petty, 2008; Pullig et al., 2006; Tormala et al., 2006). Attitude certainty isone of the most studied indicators of attitude strength (Barden and Petty, 2008).Attitude certainty reflects the consumers’ subjective sense of confidence in their attitudeor the extent to which the consumers believe that their attitude is correct (Gross et al.,1995; Tormala and Petty, 2002). Attitudes that consumers are certain about tend to bestronger than attitudes about which they have doubts. Attitude certainty can affect theresistance to subsequent persuasive attacks (Tormala and Petty, 2002; Visser andMirabile, 2004), persistence of attitudes over time (Barden and Petty, 2008; Gross et al.,1995), and attitude-behavioral correspondence (Fazio and Zanna, 1978; Haddock et al.,1999; Tormala et al., 2006).

Brand familiarity is a factor that may affect brand attitude certainty. Brandfamiliarity can be defined as the reflection of the direct and indirect brand-relatedexperiences that a consumer has accumulated over time (Alba and Hutchinson, 1987).Most real product categories contain well-established familiar brands and newunfamiliar brands (Coates et al., 2006). Even though consumers may evaluate familiarbrands better against unfamiliar brands (Arora and Stoner, 1996; Sundaram andWebter, 1999), it may be due to the fact that better known brands (usually brandleaders in the category) have a higher brand appeal in the first place (Coates et al.,2006). Familiar brands tend to be the big brands in the market (e.g. market leaders) thatsurvived the competitive market by providing good value to the consumers. Unfamiliarbrands are typical new brands that are unproven yet. Hence, brand familiarity is oftenconfounded with brand appeal.

The main contention of this research is that brand familiarity can influence brandevaluation beyond just having a higher brand appeal. DeCarlo et al. (2007) examinedhow brand familiarity can interact with brand image/appeal to influence the kind ofattributions consumers may make about negative WOM (i.e. to the WOM sender or tothe brand) and in turn influence brand evaluation (in the context of a retail store).

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This current research aims to examine how brand familiarity can interact with thecharacteristics of the WOM sender (i.e. expertise of WOM sender) to influence theconsumer’s brand evaluation. The impact of brand familiarity is expected to bemediated by the consumers’ attitude certainty (instead of attribution).

For familiar brands, consumers may have had prior experience using the brands,seen the advertising or marketing communications for the brands, gotten WOM fromfriends and family who have used the brands before, and received information from thenews media. Hence, consumers are likely to be highly certain of their evaluation of thefamiliar brands. In contrast, consumers lack certainty about their evaluation ofunfamiliar brands due to the lack of information on and experience with these brands.Moreover, this higher uncertainty for unfamiliar (versus familiar) brands is likely tolead to higher motivation to process information beyond the brand name (Friestad andWright, 1994; Wei et al., 2008).

2.2 Expertise of WOM sourcePeople tend to be economy-minded who engaged in effortful information processingonly when they deem it necessary (Eagly and Chaiken, 1993). Priester and Petty (1995)found that attitudes of cognitive misers are more dependent on message scrutiny whena knowledgeable source is of questionable honesty than when the honesty of the sourceis clear. Given that the WOM recipient generally perceives the WOM sender to beindependent of the marketers, the manipulative intent of the WOM sender is mostlikely less accessible and salient as compared to sources that are not independent of themarketers (e.g. celebrity spokesperson, salesperson) (Bansal and Voyer, 2000;Smith et al., 2005). Therefore, the WOM recipient is likely to rely on heuristicprocessing (e.g. use of source expertise) when evaluating the WOM message.

Trustworthiness and expertise are two of the more important and enduringcomponents of source credibility (Yoon et al., 1998). Trustworthiness refers to theperceived willingness of the source to make valid assertions (Yoon et al., 1998). Ingeneral, the WOM recipient perceives the WOM sender to be trustworthy, because theWOM sender is usually independent of the seller and is not trying to persuade theWOM recipient to act in some way that is detrimental to his or her interests (Bansaland Voyer, 2000; Smith et al., 2005). Thus, the WOM recipient is unlikely to be tooconcerned about the trustworthiness of the WOM sender.

Source expertise refers to the perceived ability of a source to make valid assertionsabout the issues at hand by the virtue of having relevant skills or knowledge (Homerand Kahle, 1990; Yoon et al., 1998). The perceived expertise level of the WOM sendercan assert a substantial influence on the perceived credibility of the WOM sender(Swartz, 1984; Yoon et al., 1998). As judgments based on the expertise of the source aregenerally perceived to be appropriate (Bohner et al., 2002), consumers are likely to usethe source expertise to evaluate the validity of the product evaluations that otherconsumers provide (Friestad and Wright, 1994; Maheswaran et al., 1992).

2.3 HypothesesIn general, a message from an expert (as opposed to a non-expert) tends to be morepersuasive for the consumers because a high level of perceived expertise indicates thatthe message being delivered is a valid one (Homer and Kahle, 1990). When using sourceexpertise as an evaluation basis, a consumer may choose to agree with the advocated

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position of the expert without considering the merits of the persuasive argument.As experts are perceived to possess knowledge about the product being evaluated andcapable of making correct assertions about the product, the level of perceived expertiseof the source provides evidence of the message validity (Homer and Kahle, 1990).However, past research has shown that the impact of the expertise of the source onpersuasion can be moderated by various factors (Bohner et al., 2002; Petty et al., 1981).An individual will attempt to strike a balance between minimizing cognitive effortexpended and maximizing his or her confidence about a judgment (Chaiken et al.,1989). Hence, a consumer is more likely to process additional information when his orher confidence in judgment is low (Zuckerman and Chaiken, 1998).

For unfamiliar brands, the consumers’ brand attitude certainty is low and theconsumers are more inclined to process additional information including the sourceexpertise. Hence, the consumers may rely on the source expertise as a basis ofevaluation for an unfamiliar brand. Conversely, consumers are more certain about theirbrand attitude toward familiar brands and are less inclined to process any additionalinformation about the brand. Therefore, the use of source expertise is expected to belimited for a familiar brand. In the context of positive WOM communication, thefollowing relationship is expected:

H1. Perceived high (versus low) expertise of WOM sender will lead to a morepositive brand attitude.

H2. Brand familiarity moderates the impact of WOM sender’s expertise on brandattitude. Specifically, perceived high (versus low) expertise of WOM senderwill lead to a more positive attitude toward an unfamiliar brand. However,perceived expertise of WOM sender has little or no impact on attitude towarda familiar brand.

3. The present research3.1 Overview of design and participantsBrand familiarity (familiar versus unfamiliar), and expertise of WOM sender (highversus low) were manipulated between-subjects to test the hypotheses in twoexperiments. The study participants were undergraduate students from a majoruniversity in Singapore. Experiment 1 had 50 study participants and Experiment 2 had78 study participants. In both experiments, study participants were given coursecredits for their participation. The printer product category was pretested to berelevant to the undergraduates and the brand extension of two brands to the printerproduct category was chosen as the context of both experiments.

3.2 Experiment 13.2.1 Procedure and measurements. Two pretests were conducted. The first pretestidentified a familiar brand and an unfamiliar brand, confirmed the effectiveness of theexpertise manipulation, and identified important product attributes to use in the WOMmessage. The second pretest confirmed that the argument strength and/orcomprehension of the WOM message did not affect the expertise manipulation.

In the first pretest, brand names from a single product category were rated on twodimensions: brand familiarity and brand appeal (Coates et al., 2006). The two chosenbrand names should differ only on brand familiarity. The context of the pretest and

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subsequent experiment is the brand extension of the familiar and unfamiliar brand intoa new but related product category (i.e. printer product category). Twenty-oneparticipants did the pretest. In this pretest, the participants rated 17 brands of personalcomputer (PC) that are available in the Singapore market. Based on the comparison ofthe ratings across the different brands, two brands were chosen. On a seven-point scaleof very unfamiliar (1) to very familiar (7), they rated Acer (M ¼ 5.9) to be significantlymore familiar than BenQ (M ¼ 4.6) ( p , 0.01). On the other hand, Acer (M ¼ 4.6) is notsignificantly different ( p . 0.50) from that of BenQ (M ¼ 4.4) on a seven-point scale ofvery unappealing (1) to very appealing (7). Hence, Acer (i.e. familiar brand) and BenQ(i.e. unfamiliar brand) were chosen. Both brands are PC manufacturers that are alreadyin several related product categories.

Perceived expertise of the WOM sender was manipulated by varying the WOMsender’s experience with the product category (i.e. number of purchases made) and theWOM sender’s formal training and occupation (i.e. related or unrelated to the productcategory) (Alba and Hutchinson, 1987; Feick and Higie, 1992) in the WOM scenario forthe subsequent experiment. It was then measured using two items (i.e. ability of WOMsender to evaluate the quality of the printer, and ability of WOM sender to giveaccurate information about the various attributes of printers) from very low (1) to veryhigh (7) on a seven-point scale.

The top three most important attributes (i.e. color printing, price of printer, price ofreplacement toner and cartridge) were also identified. On a seven-point scale from veryunimportant (1) to very important (7), the mean importance scores range from 6.3 to 6.5for the three most important attributes. These three attributes were used in the WOMmessage for the experiment.

As comprehension of the message can moderate the impact of source cues(Ratneshwar and Chaiken, 1991), technical details/jargons were limited to a minimum toensure the study participants would be able to understand the message. Moreover,consumers who use the expert heuristic may expect an expert’s message (as opposed toa novice’s message) to consist of convincing arguments (Bohner et al., 2002). Consumersmay also expect experts to deliver messages with strong arguments (e.g. detailed andquantitative information) and non-experts to deliver messages with weak arguments(e.g. own verbal evaluations) (Artz and Tybout, 1999). The manipulation for WOMsender’s expertise worked as expected ( p , 0.01), suggesting that the wording of thearguments presented in the WOM message were suitable.

In the main experiment, the study participants were randomly assigned to one of thefour conditions in a laboratory setting. The study participants were asked to rate thebrand assigned to them (Acer or BenQ) using three seven-point semantic differentialscales with the following anchors: very negative (1) – very positive (7), veryunfavorable (1) – very favorable (7), and very bad (1) – very good (7) (a ¼ 0.94). Thesethree items were averaged to form the pre-WOM attitude rating. The simple rating taskwas followed by two short filler tasks to clear short-term memory. After the filler tasks,the study participants were asked to imagine that they were considering buying aprinter (from either of the assigned brands) and decided to ask a friend, Chris, for arecommendation. This WOM scenario included the manipulation of WOM sender’sexpertise (i.e. stated how many printers Chris had bought before and Chris’background in terms of formal training and occupation). The following is an exampleof the WOM message used (brand name depended on condition assigned):

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Even though [Acer/BenQ ] printers are new to the Singapore market, you should considergetting a [Acer/BenQ ] printer. All of the printer models for [Acer/BenQ ] have colour printing.This will probably be useful for you to print coloured graphics and photos for your schoolreports. The price of a [Acer/BenQ ] printer is also very affordable with the student discountthat you can get. The replacement cartridges and toners for [Acer/BenQ ] printers are also verycheap. You will not have to worry about how expensive it is to print each and every page.

The study participants were then asked to rate the brand again with the same threescales used in the first rating task. These three items were averaged to form thepost-WOM attitude rating of interest (a ¼ 0.92). In the last section, the studyparticipants filled out other items relating to the WOM scenario, covariates (e.g. sourcelikeability and involvement with the task of evaluating the brand), and manipulationchecks (the same items used in the pretests). The experimenter then thanked anddismissed the study participants.

3.2.2 Results and discussion. The analysis on the manipulation checks indicates thatthe manipulation for brand familiarity worked as expected. Familiarity for Acer(M ¼ 4.6) is significantly greater than familiarity for BenQ (M ¼ 3.4) (F(1, 46) ¼ 17.17,p , 0.05). On the other hand, the study participants did not rate Acer (M ¼ 3.8) andBenQ (M ¼ 3.7) differently on appeal (F(1, 46) ¼ 0.07, p . 0.75). In addition, theexpertise manipulation works with the study participants perceiving WOM sender ofhigh expertise (M ¼ 4.9) to have higher ability than WOM sender of low expertise(M ¼ 4.3) (F(1, 46) ¼ 5.23, p , 0.05).

The main analysis was done using a two-way analysis of covariance (ANCOVA),with the post-WOM attitude rating as the dependent variable. Pre-WOM attitude ratingand likeability of WOM sender were included as covariates. A closer examination of theitem measuring source likeability shows a marginally significant interaction betweenbrand familiarity and expertise (F(1, 46) ¼ 3.55, p . 0.05). The potential confoundingeffect from source likeability was taken into consideration in Experiment 2.

The main effect of expertise of WOM sender is not significant (F(1, 44) ¼ 1.83,p . 0.10). The main effect of brand familiarity is also not significant (F(1, 44) ¼ 0.93,p . 0.30). The expected interaction effect between brand familiarity and expertise issignificant (F(1, 44) ¼ 4.19, p , 0.05), supporting the hypothesis that familiarity of thebrand moderates the use of expertise of WOM sender for brand evaluation. As therelationships seemed to differ across the two levels of familiarity, additional post hocanalyses were done to examine the simple effects at each level. The Bonferroniprocedure was used to adjust for the two comparisons made, with the overall error rateat 0.05. For Acer, the familiar brand, the difference in brand attitude between highexpertise and low expertise is not significant (F(1, 44) ¼ 0.26, p . 0.60) (Table I).

Pre-WOM attitudemean score (SD)

Post-WOM attitudemean score (SD)

Familiar brandHigh expertise (n ¼ 12) 3.92 (1.02) 4.39 (1.17)Low expertise (n ¼ 13) 4.13 (1.01) 4.57 (0.95)Unfamiliar brandHigh expertise (n ¼ 12) 3.72 (0.81) 5.12 (0.82)Low expertise (n ¼ 13) 3.85 (1.14) 4.30 (1.05)

Table I.Pre-WOM and

post-WOM attituderating (Experiment 1)

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For BenQ, the unfamiliar brand, brand attitude from high expertise is significanthigher than that from low expertise (Table I) (F(1, 44) ¼ 5.61, p , 0.025). Therefore, themoderation effect (H2) is supported.

3.3 Experiment 23.3.1 Procedure and measurements. The procedure for this experiment was similar tothat of Experiment 1, except with a few changes to address certain issues inExperiment 1. The study participants were asked to rate their confidence level of theirpre-WOM rating of the assigned brand by using a seven-point scale from veryunconfident (1) to very confident (7). The study participants were also asked to ratetheir desired confidence on a seven-point scale from very unconfident (1) to veryconfident (7). These measures can help lend support to the argument that the predictedinteraction effect is driven by the difference in actual confidence between familiar andunfamiliar brands.

To increase the study participants’ level of involvement with the evaluation task,they were also asked to imagine in the WOM scenario that they are purchasing theprinter for the use of their upcoming school projects and assignments. Themanipulation of the expertise of WOM sender was also changed. The studyparticipants were asked to think of a friend or relative who was very likely to be anexpert (or non-expert) in the product category of printers as part of the WOM scenario.The change in the manipulation method ensures that the findings are robust acrossdifferent manipulation methods. Other factors, besides expertise of the WOM sender),might have been changed due to the initial manipulation in Experiment 1. Thismanipulation of expertise did not affect source likeability in the pretest stage. However,source likeability may still differ in the experiment. Hence, source likeability was stillmeasured to check for its possible impact on the expertise manipulation. Moreover,consumers with high expertise and consumers with low expertise may also differ interms of tie strength with the study participants (Constant et al., 1996). As tie strengthcan have an influence on the impact of WOM (Brown and Reingen, 1987), tie strengthwas measured using four items (a ¼ 0.96) pertaining to the study participants’perception of their supportiveness, closeness (two items), and association with theWOM sender. Study participants also rated their own knowledge about printers on aseven-point scale from very unknowledgeable (1) to very knowledgeable (7).

3.3.2 Results and discussion. Analyses on the manipulation checks indicate that themanipulations worked as expected. The study participants rated Acer (M ¼ 5.0) to besignificantly more familiar than BenQ (M ¼ 4.0) (F(1, 74) ¼ 8.19, p , 0.01). On theother hand, the study participants did not rate Acer (M ¼ 4.1) as different from BenQ(M ¼ 3.9) (F(1, 74) ¼ 0.39, p . 0.50) in appeal. In addition, the study participantsperceived the high-expertise WOM sender to have greater ability (M ¼ 5.4) in regardsto the printer category than the low-expertise WOM sender (M ¼ 3.5) (F(1, 74) ¼ 55.92,p , 0.01). Source likeability did not differ across conditions, indicating a lack of effecton the dependent variable.

A two-way ANCOVA on post-WOM rating of the brand, with pre-WOM rating ofthe brand as a covariate, was conducted. The inclusion of other covariates such as tiestrength and source likeability did not change the significant level of the tested effects.Due to the ease of interpretation and the need of brevity, only the results of theANCOVA with pre-WOM ratings of the brand as a covariate are reported.

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The familiarity main effect is not significant (F(1, 73) ¼ 2.29, p . 0.10). Theexpertise main effect is marginally significant (F(1, 73) ¼ 3.57, p , 0.10). The expectedinteraction effect between brand familiarity and expertise is significant (F(1, 73) ¼ 4.16,p , 0.05). As with Experiment 1, post hoc analyses were run to examine theserelationships at each level of familiarity, adjusting for the two comparisons using theBonferroni procedure. Under familiar brand, brand attitudes from high expertise andlow expertise were not statistically different (Table II) (F(1, 73) ¼ 0.01, p . 0.90).Under unfamiliar brand, brand attitude from high expertise is significant higher thanthat from low expertise (Table II) (F(1, 73) ¼ 7.93, p , 0.01). Therefore, the expectedinteraction effect (H2) is supported by the results in Experiment 2.

Additional analysis on attitude certainty was done to give an insight into whatmight have driven the results. The study participants were significantly moreconfident in their rating of the familiar brand (M ¼ 4.5) than the unfamiliar brand(M ¼ 3.9) (F(1, 74) ¼ 4.20, p , 0.05). These results do suggest that the attitudecertainty differ across unfamiliar and familiar brands. As attitude certainty wasmeasured using a single item and lacking in reliability, no additional mediatedmoderation analysis was conducted.

4. General discussionA key conceptual contribution of this paper is to demonstrate how brand familiaritycan moderate the use of source cues (i.e. expertise of the WOM sender) in thecontext of interpersonal consumer communication about product evaluation. Eventhough past research has looked at how brand can affect the processing of laterinformation (Oxoby and Finnigan, 2007), this research contributes by demonstratingthat this effect may be moderated by brand familiarity. The results from bothexperiments suggest that consumers may rely on the expertise of the WOM senderto evaluate unfamiliar brands, but not for familiar brands. The results are not likelyto be driven by an overly positive evaluation of the familiar brand compared to theunfamiliar brand, as the study participants did not rate the familiar brandsignificantly higher than the unfamiliar brand in terms of pre-WOM attitude andappeal of brand.

Experiment 2 also provides some preliminary support that this phenomenon may bedue to the difference between the attitude certainty toward the familiar and unfamiliarbrand. The results of these two experiments illustrate the importance of consideringconsumers’ brand attitude certainty in predicting attitude change. This researchcontributes to the recent stream of literature exploring how attitude certainty can

Pre-WOM attitudemean score (SD)

Post-WOM attitudemean score (SD)

Familiar brandHigh expertise (n ¼ 19) 3.96 (1.04) 4.78 (0.90)Low expertise (n ¼ 19) 4.11 (1.21) 4.81 (0.74)Unfamiliar brandHigh expertise (n ¼ 20) 4.12 (1.03) 4.86 (0.69)Low expertise (n ¼ 20) 4.07 (0.96) 4.30 (0.85)

Table II.Pre-WOM and

post-WOM attituderating (Experiment 2)

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influence persuasion (Barden and Petty, 2008; Pullig et al., 2006; Tormala et al., 2006).Moreover, this paper focuses on peer-to-peer persuasion rather than companysponsored persuasive messages. Even though WOM messages are typicallyconsidered to be from trustworthy sources (Bansal and Voyer, 2000; Smith et al.,2005), consumers are unlikely to take a WOM message of an unfamiliar brand(i.e. uncertain brand attitude) at face value. Other factors (e.g. amount of elaboration)that influence brand attitude certainty may generate the same interaction effect.

Both non-academic and academic researchers ought to consider how the differencesin attitude certainty and other measures of attitude strength can influence their studiesabout attitude changes. The brands used for some consumer behavior experimentsmay be unknown/unfamiliar to the subjects. The use of familiar brands caninadvertently affect the conclusions drawn in some of these experiments and the extentto which the results of the experiments can be generalized. For example, Kirmani andShiv (1998) found that source congruity enhances attitudes under conditions of highissue-relevant elaboration by using of hypothetical brands in their experiments.Kirmani and Shiv (1998) manipulated source congruity by matching a certain endorserto the positioning of these hypothetical brands. However, brand familiarity maymoderate the impact of source congruity. Source congruity may not enhance the brandattitudes toward familiar brands from their current levels, as the consumers may notelaborate on the information even in conditions of high issue-relevant elaboration dueto their attitude certainty toward familiar brands.

Sundaram and Webter (1999) found that unfamiliar brand has more to gain frompositive WOM in terms of brand evaluations (i.e. purchase intentions and brandattitudes). The relationship does not hold in this study. The expertise of the WOMsender was not manipulated in Sundaram and Webter’s experiment. In the twoexperiments here, the lower receptiveness of WOM about an unfamiliar brand sent byWOM sender with low expertise is likely to contribute to the insignificant main effect.The results in this study show that consumers may not indiscriminately use positiveWOM to bolster their brand evaluations of unfamiliar brands.

Marketers may use brand extensions in order to build and communicate strongbrand positioning, increase the probability of trial by lessening new product risk forconsumers, and enhance awareness and quality associations. Although the directimpact of the parent brand on the evaluation of brand extensions is the focus of mostexisting brand extension studies (Sjodin, 2008), the evaluations of brand extensions donot occur in a vacuum of information from other sources. Hence, this research can helpin the understanding of how consumers can be affected by additional information inthe marketplace (WOM in this case) in their evaluation of new brand extensions. Also,the current research suggests whether consumers use information from additionalsources depends on the consumers’ actual confidence in their evaluation of new brandextensions.

This research has implications for marketers who use WOM as a form of marketing.The results highlight the importance of considering the strength dimensions of brandattitudes (e.g. attitude certainty) in the marketplace. Given the preliminary findings inExperiment 2, promotion efforts that potentially influence brand familiarity(e.g. frequency of the advertisements) (Alba and Hutchinson, 1987) may conceivablyaffect brand attitude certainty. For marketers of unfamiliar brands, source factors(e.g. expertise and likeability of WOM sender) are important to consider for effective

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use of WOM to market their products. Hence, the use of opinion leaders, presumablyrespected for their opinions in certain product categories, is crucial for unfamiliarbrands when adopting WOM marketing. However, most opinion leaders arepotentially online bloggers and the dynamics could be very different. For ourfindings to be generalizable to the online context, future research needs to take thedifferences between the offline and online context into consideration. For familiarbrands, source factors are less relevant. When the marketers of familiar brands engagein WOM marketing, they do not need to be as discriminating in choosing the WOMsources. Whether the WOM sources are perceived experts or not by the consumers, thedifference in influence is negligible.

5. Limitations and future directionsIn the two experiments, the WOM messages were presented in a pallid manner to thestudy participants. This manipulation method of presenting WOM in a printed formatmay understate the impact of WOM. In addition, the experiments do not provide thestudy participants with any opportunities for clarification and immediate feedback, amajor benefit of using WOM. Moreover, the two WOM scenarios might have beenperceived to be unrealistic due to the experimental design to address the issue ofinternal validity. For example, the WOM verbatim used for each experiment wasworded to be suitable for both an expert WOM sender and a non-expert WOM sender.Hence, the WOM verbatim could not be too informal as it might be in a more naturalsetting with friends and family. On a seven-point scale from very unrealistic (1) to veryrealistic (7), the mean scores for Experiment 1 (M ¼ 4.9) and Experiment 2 (M ¼ 4.8)are only moderately high.

However, the intention for this paper was to look at the specific impact of theinformational influence of WOM. Hence, the choice was to increase experimentalcontrol, rather than ensuring a more naturalistic setting to observe the impact of WOMand in turn increasing the complexity of the interpretation of the results. The reductionof potential noise has the benefit of increased power for hypothesis testing. Eventhough the use of written scenarios can be viewed as a limitation, it can help to ensurethe study participants elaborate upon the information without confounds of thesignaler’s appearance or nonverbal cues (Wood, 2006). Vivid methods of manipulation(e.g. the use of confederates) are much harder to control for extraneous influence,especially if actual acquaintances, friends, and family members are to be involved inthe experiments. Moreover, a lot of WOM communication today is done throughemails, instant messaging, and social media (e.g. Facebook, private blogs). These formsof online communication are similar to the WOM context and the presentation mode ofthe experiments. The vivid manipulations of WOM may be suitable for future researchthat requires a more holistic view of the impact of WOM, whereby control ofextraneous factors may be less of a concern.

Johnson and Russo (1984) look at the nonlinear relationship between productfamiliarity (rather than brand familiarity) and learning. There is a possibility that thesame nonlinear relationship holds for brand familiarity as well. For the twoexperiments, the means for brand familiarity range from 3.4 to 5.0 on a seven-pointscale. Hence, the findings here are likely to hold for a moderate level of brandfamiliarity only. The main difficulty in choosing brands of high or low familiarity isthat the familiarity of the brand can be confounded with the appeal of the brand.

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For example, study participants rated very familiar brands (e.g. Apple) to besignificantly more appealing than less familiar brands in the pretest. Even thoughappeal of the brand has been controlled for in the two experiments, the two brands maystill differ on other dimensions. One approach to address this methodological issue is tomanipulate brand familiarity using hypothetical brands. A possible way to do so is toengage study participants in evaluating advertisements of various brands. Thefrequency of the advertisement exposure during the task can be used to manipulatebrand familiarity for each brand. Brand familiarity should increase with the increasednumber of prior exposures. Future studies need to take into account the full range ofbrand familiarity and address any possible confounds while doing so.

As the target product category of interest (i.e. printers) requires substantial productknowledge and ability for the consumers to evaluate the product informationsystematically, the use of expert heuristic may be more pronounced in this productcategory for the average consumer. Consumers who are experts themselves may alsobe less inclined to use the expert heuristic, as they are knowledgeable enough toevaluate product information systematically. Hence, a possible moderator of therelationship may be the product categories of interest and the level of expertise of theWOM recipient. These variables can be included in future research.

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Corresponding authorBoon Chong Lim can be contacted at: boonchong@ntu.edu.sg

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