Positive Word‐of‐Mouth: Customer Satisfaction and Buyer Behaviour

Bank marketers are making considerable efforts to increase the satisfaction of their commercial customers because satisfied customers are known to display higher levels of source loyalty and to be less vulnerable to the marketing efforts of competitors. A third reason is to create positive word‐of‐mouth among their peer and advisory communities. This study by telephone interview of 325 medium‐sized business owners in the USA shows that positive word‐of‐mouth is a powerful factor in the purchase of financial services but is less effective in predicting eventual service satisfaction.