Compensatory Communication: Consumer Knowledge Discrepancies and Knowledge Signaling in Word-of-Mouth

People who believe they are knowledgeable about products tend to share this knowledge more with others. This tenet is central to research on word-of-mouth motivation (e.g. Engel et al. 1969; Feick and Price 1987; Wojnicki and Godes 2012) and consistent with Gricean maxims—those who believe they are more knowledgeable should make an appropriately weighted ‘conversational contribution’ by sharing their knowledge more with others (Grice 1991). A prediction that follows from this research is that a perceived shortcoming in consumer knowledge should constrain a person’s motivation to share product information. While recognizing this possibility, we predict that perceived deficiencies in consumer knowledge sometimes lead to an increase rather than a decrease in word-of-mouth transmission. Why might this occur? Subjective consumer knowledge has been defined as what or how much a person thinks she presently knows about products (Park et al. 1994). Extending this definition, we propose that consumer knowledge consequences may be linked not only to a person’s beliefs about their present-state attributes or “actual self,” but also the “ideal self” they desire to be in the same domain (Markus and Wurf 1987). A discrepancy between a person’s perception of their actual and ideal consumer knowledge (a knowledge discrepancy) may have significant behavioral consequences (Baumeister 1982). A common response to self-discrepancies is compensatory self-enhancement, whereby people work to promote more favorable impressions of themselves with self-concept relevant audiences (e.g. Swann et al. 1989). Building on prior research on compensatory self-enhancement (e.g. Rucker and Galinsky 2008) and self-concept motivation in word-of-mouth (e.g. Berger and Schwartz 2011), we predict that the desire to produce compensatory signals of higher consumer knowledge sometimes leads knowledge discrepant individuals to share more (rather than less) product information. Four studies test our compensatory communication hypothesis.