Effects of Reputation, Relational Satisfaction, and Customer-Company Identification on Positive Word-of-Mouth Intentions

By combining the growing body of knowledge on organizational reputation and organization-public relationships with insights from marketing literature on customer-company identification, this study develops and tests models of customers' positive word-of-mouth (WOM) intentions. Specifically, this study examines the effects of organizational reputation and relational satisfaction on customers' positive WOM intentions, and the critical mediation role of customer-company identification in such effects. The proposed models illustrate tenable data-model fits, and the results indicate that organizational reputation and relational satisfaction predict customers' positive WOM intentions. More important, customer-company identification mediates the influence of organizational reputation on positive WOM intentions. The findings of this study suggest that, to promote customers' positive WOM intentions, companies need to obtain a favorable reputation held by customers and cultivate a satisfactory relationship with customers, while fostering customer-company identification.