Quality, value, satisfaction, trust, a

LITERATURE REVIEW
Word-of-Web
Word-of-mouth (WOM) is an extremely important and influential source of information to
consumers engaged in the buying decision process (e.g., see Gilly et al. 1998, Maxham and
Netemeyer 2002, Richins 1983, Srinivasan, Anderson, and Ponnavolu 2002). The World
Wide Web is another effective medium through which consumers spread consumption
related information among each other. Marketers have referred to consumer information
diffused to other consumers through this means as electronic or Internet word of mouth
(Hanson 2000). The spirit of these expressions is fine at face value; however, technically,
such information transmitted via the Internet is not word-of-mouth. Word-of-mouth is the
exchange of oral or spoken messages between a source and a receiver concerning the
purchase of a good or service (Ong 1982) in real time and space (Stern 1994). Word-of-web
(WOW) is, arguably, a more precise term for describing behavior where product or purchase
related information is communicated from consumer to consumer via the Web, either at real
time or not.
Word-of-web is spread through a variety of electronic forms, such as email, including viral
marketing (Godin 2001) and e-newsletters (Katz 2002, Scientific American 2001), instant
messaging, including chat rooms (Gelb and Sundaram 2002), online community or
discussion forums (Bickart and Schindler 2001, Hagel and Armstrong 1997, Kozinets 2002,
Rheingold 2000), websites, including weblogs (Cristol 2002, Levy 2002), reviews, and rating
and reviews (Kuehl 1999). Review information differs from rating-and-review WOW in that
the latter includes a quantitative measure of some scale type, be it ordinal, interval or ratio, in
its evaluation of a target object, such as a product. The rating-and-review (RR) form,
121