| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣科技大學 === 企業管理系 === 92 === Customer referral programs are popular promotional tools used by firms to manage consumers’ word-of-mouth behavior. However, there is few rigorous empirical researches concerning the effect and operating mechanism of referral program. We chose hairdressing service users as the experimental subjects and a 2 (low or high value of reward) X 2 (easy or difficult) experiment was conducted to investigate the impact of referral programs on the participants’ word-of-mouth motivation, customer loyalty, and recommendation. In regard to the effect of referral programs, the results indicate that high value of reward not only decrease participants’ loyalty, but also is not helpful to increase recommendation. This negative effect can be explained by the mechanism of program.
As for the mechanism of referral programs, the value of reward will influence participants’ intrinsic and extrinsic motivation of word-of-mouth behavior, but the difficulty of program has no effect on motivation. Then, intrinsic motivation will affect recommendation both directly and indirectly through brand loyalty, but extrinsic motivation can only influence recommendation indirectly through program loyalty. Though high value of reward can increase extrinsic motivation, it will decrease intrinsic motivation, and the impact of intrinsic motivation is bigger than which of extrinsic motivation. Therefore, it will cause the negative effect.
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