Cross-industrial study on satisfaction-commitment-PWOM linkage: The role of competition, consumption visibility, and service relationship

This study investigates how industry characteristics affect the relationships between customer satisfaction, commitment, and positive word-of-mouth (PWOM) intention. Specifically, it examines the moderating roles of competition, consumption visibility (private or public), and service relationship (contractual or noncontractual) within the satisfaction-commitment-PWOM linkage. A theoretical model was developed and validated by analyzing large-scale survey data encompassing 174,719 customer responses across 40 industries using the structural equation modeling (SEM) approach. As expected, we found that customer satisfaction positively affects PWOM intention. However, the impact was more pronounced in industries with lower competition intensity, higher consumption visibility, and longer service relationship, whereas the link between commitment and PWOM appears to be the same across industries. These findings suggest that industry characteristics should be addressed in WOM research, and uniform marketing methods should not be implemented in practice, as there are differences in WOM generation mechanisms in different industries.