Exploring the role of referral efficacy in the relationship between consumer innovativeness and intention to generate word of mouth

Referral marketing plays an important role in promoting new products. When it comes to innovative agricultural products, early adopter's review or recommendation has a more critical impact on follower's purchase decision making. Hence, understanding of consumer's characteristics and needs play more important role in success of innovation. More particularly, other researchers pay attention to the role of consumer innovativeness. This study attempts to fill this gap in knowledge between innovative propensity of consumer and her/his intention to generate positive word of mouth about new agricultural products. Furthermore, in this paper, we adopt Vandecasteele and Geunes' motivated consumer innovativeness model to investigate consumer innovativeness in extrinsic motive and intrinsic motive level, and examine the moderating role of referral efficacy. For empirical verification, survey method is used for data collection. Partial least square (PLS) is adopted to analyze the data. Finally, several theoretical contributions and practical implications are discussed.