Leveraging customer to customer interactions in a B2B purchasing context

Abstract

Social Networking has gained predominance in the recent past with advances in networking technologies. The most influential method of customer to customer interaction is through Word of Mouth (WoM). Though Word of Mouth communications have been recognized as a critical form of influence since the early 1950s, limited work has been done to adopt the techniques in the context of business marketing. Through this study we intend to apply the concepts of Word of Mouth communications between customers as a marketing strategy in the business world. Because of the vast nature of the industry and the infancy of the topic, we have restricted our scope to verifying the relevance of Word of Mouth (WoM) in an IT services purchasing decision