Internet forums as influential sources of consumer information

We report the results of an experiment in which consumers wereinstructed to gather online information about one of five specificproduct topics by accessing either online discussions (i.e., Internetforums or bulletin boards) or marketer-generated onlineinformation (i.e., corporate webpages). At the end of a 12-weekperiod, the consumers who gathered information from onlinediscussions reported greater interest in the product topic than didthose consumers who acquired information from the marketer-generated sources. We discuss the study’s implications for betterunderstanding word-of-mouth communication and for developingmore successful consumer websites. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. andDirect Marketing Educational Foundation, Inc.fJOURNAL OF INTERACTIVE MARKETINGVOLUME 15 / NUMBER 3 / SUMMER 2001 31BARBARA BICKART is AssociateProfessor of Marketing at RutgersUniversity, Camden, New Jersey;e-mail: bickart@camden.rutgers.edu.ROBERT M. SCHINDLER isAssociate Professor of Marketing atRutgers University, Camden, NewJersey; e-mail: rschindl@camden.rutgers.edu.