C-2-C MARKET RELATIONS AND WORD OF MOUTH

Abstract

Most market research focuses on business-to-business and business-to-consumer interactions to explain the structure and dynamics of the market. Meanwhile, negligible effort has been invested in researching consumer-to-consumer interaction and its impact on companies’ behaviour and purchase decision-making, which determines business performance. The greatest challenge for marketers at the beginning of the 21st century is this third relationship dimension, consumer-to-consumer interaction: how consumers influence each other’s attitudes, expectations, perceptions, preferences, satisfaction, loyalty, and purchasing decisions, and, importantly, the possibility of incorporating consumers into businesses’ marketing programmes. Despite the existence of a multitude of media and different forms of communication between businesses and the market, such as newspapers, periodicals, billboards, television etc., a considerable portion of information is communicated to consumers informally, mostly in the form of word-of-mouth. The information received by consumers through this communication form – from family and similar individuals – is very often accepted as more reliable and certain than information transmitted through formal communication channels. What is often neglected when studying the phenomenon of word-of-mouth communication is the fact that its efficiency and effect also depend on the type and character of the interaction between the consumers themselves. This paper aims to investigate the extent to which the nature of customer-to-customer (C2C) interaction influences the effect of word-of-mouth communication.