Effects of Homophily and Gender-Product Congruency on Word-of-Mouth Influence - General Overview and Proposed Experimentation

One of the most widely accepted notions in consumer behavior is that word-of-mouth (WOM) communication is one of the ways in which this influence manifests itself in shaping consumer's attitudes and behaviors. The WOM can have an important role from a managerial standpoint. The widespread implications, together with the intrinsic fascination of the topic created the basis for a reach academic literature. The purpose of this article is just to offer an overview - by no means exhaustive - of this topic and to propose an experiment. A further step will be the actual experimentation with two populations of undergraduate students, one in USA and one in Romania, to check also for cultural differences