The Effects Of Word-of-Mouth Communication On The Purchase Decisions Of Rural Residents In Chinese Context

During recent years,how to promote rural consumption has been the topical issue in economic and administrative domains as the preferential policies are put forward ,such as home appliances and motor vehicles going to the countryside, however, at this point, either government promotes rural consumption, or enterprises open up rural markets, there is a dire need for both of them to establish relations with rural residents by means of using their habitual communication and choosing credible spokesmen to spread new policies or new products. This present paper considers word of mouth as the key factor, that is to say, companies should make efficient use of word-of-mouth communication which is regarded as the most widely used and fully trusted communication tool among rural residents. Word of mouth is counted among the most important points of reference at the phase of consumers'pre-purchase,which is reflected in the publicity and promotion for new products and services of enterprises, and word-of-mouth communication with what effect will exert direct influence on the consumers'products attitude and valuation, especially in the rural area, together with the special relational and geopolitical interpersonal web in so called acquaintance society, word-of-mouth communication turns into the habitual and trustful way of communication due to scarce information and narrow communicational channel. Although many qualitative researches agree that word-of-mouth communication plays an important role in changing purchase behaviors of rural consumers, it still makes many eager companies confused about how to make suitable marketing tactics on word-of-mouth communication in accordance with consumer psychology and local conditions in rural area. In order to deal with this problem appropriately, we need to deeply study the effects of word-of-mouth on the purchase decisions of rural residents in Chinese context.At present,most of the studies on rural consumers is from the perspective of economics and researchers make main use of intended model in western economics to analyze and predict consumer demand level and consumption structure in rural area. It is easy to see there is rare study on consumer psychology and consumption custom of rural residents from the angle of management. The present paper chooses to investigate the relationship between word-of-mouth communication and purchase decisions of rural consumers on account that the current word-of-mouth theories are formed in western academic circle and on basic of these achievements domestic researchers put so much attention to word-of-mouth influence by taking into consideration the overall situation that there is scarcely a empirical study focused on particular consumer group, especially the rural consumers. Having considered all the discussions above, this paper applies itself to deeply study on the impacts of the characteristics of word-of-mouth communicators and receivers and word-of-mouth information type on the purchase decisions of rural residents. The author divides the characteristics of word-of-mouth communicators into expertise, opinion leader and strength tie, divides word-of-mouth information type into objective facts and subject evaluation, measures receivers'characteristics with perceived risk, and respectively investigate the impacts of each element on purchase decisions of rural consumers with a moderator function of type of merchandise.The author gave out two hundred and twenty-eight questionnaires, recycled two hundred and thirty-three of them, and finally we got one hundred and ninety-three valid ones of all through weeding out blank ones with an effective rate of 81.78 percent .After collecting questionnaires, we went into the stage of data analyses depending on SPSS 16.0 statistical software. To tell in detail, we did descriptive statistical analysis of sample structure firstly so as to understand sample distribution, then test validity and reliability of scale respectively, for instance, we measured the former with Cronbachαto guarantee the scale's stability and creditability and measured the latter with factor analysis by calculating factor loading, and the results showed that this present scale had got a pretty good validity and reliability. In the following research stage of hypothesis test, the author started correlation analysis, ANOVA and multiple regression analysis one by one. The results of study are explained as follows. Firstly, the expertise of word-of-mouth communicator exerts the highest influence on the communication effect among rural consumers. This has some connection with current consumption situation of rural residents. To tell in detail, rural residents lacks sound judgments caused by restrained educational attainments, thus they prefer to consult other consumers with a high expertise before purchasing. Opinion leadership comes a close second, this means opinion leaders become the trendsetting of how to buy and what to buy in rural area and their information is more convincing to other villagers. Thirdly, the higher the perceived risk is, the more influence the word-of-mouth communication exerts on rural consumers. The present study confirmed the impact of financial/function risk on word-of-mouth communication effect is higher than society/psychology, this indicates that rural residents also care about face thing besides the purchased product or service it, and word-of-mouth information is very effective at lowering these kinds of worries of rural consumers. Strength tie also plays an important role in rural area, this shows that word-of-mouth communicators and receivers have a strong trust to each other under the rural natural affinity and geo-relationship, rural consumers are convinced of various purchase information from strong strength tie because this kind of communicators can provide proper product and service in accordance with receivers'preferences and customs .Finally, word-of-mouth information type is associated with word-of-mouth communication effect, which finds expression in the way that the impact of word of mouth with subject evaluations is higher on word-to-mouth communication effect in rural consumer group comparing to word of mouth with objective facts. This indicated that rural consumers are not interested in the various function indicators and data; instead they are more attentive to authentic and concrete purchase experiences. Furthermore, after comparing product purchase with service purchase of rural consumers, the results find that the impacts of each influencing factor of word-of-mouth communication effect are higher on the service purchase decisions of rural consumers than product purchase except communicator's expertise, and this reflects that rural consumers are so unfamiliar with service consumption which is quite common in most cities, that they easily perceived more risks and uncertainties, therefore they are badly in need of purchase experiences from opinion leaders or relatives and friends to understand the content and values of various service consumption.To sum up, carrying out word-of-mouth marketing activities positively is an effective measure for enterprises to improve competitiveness in rural market. The enterprises should make every efforts to establish relationship with rural residents, energize the word of mouth management, and work out word-of-mouth marketing strategies to suit local conditions, for instance, the enterprise could organize specialized team to make patient explanation about product and service in order to reduce the risk anxiety of rural consumers, inspire rural opinion leaders to be the publicist of product or service, encourage rural residents to communicate with their relatives and friends, adapt proper expressions to make marketing promotion which are easy to understand for rural consumers.