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Marketing in entrepreneurial contexts, such as small business, relies heavily on word of mouth (WOM) recommendations for customer acquisition. However we know little about how WOM processes work for small firms, or how owner-managers can influence them.This case study of an entrepreneurial owner of an independent hotel is used to illustrate problems associated with WOM, and potential strategies to overcome them. The ownermanager researched existing hotel customers through face-to-face interviews and a questionnaire. The results confirmed the importance of WOM, but found two sets of dissonance. One was between input WOM types and sources, the other between output WOM content and targets. The owner-manager improved the effectiveness of WOM communications through a variety of interventions. Demonstrating that WOM can be an effective part of a marketing strategy for a small firm. MANAGERIAL AND POLICY IMPLICATIONS• Small and medium sized enterprises (SMES) can influence the informal process of wordof-mouth communication.• The first stage for the entrepreneur is to investigate how WOM process work in the context of the specific business.• Entrepreneurs need to understand the input WOM types and sources, and the output WOM content and targets. They should also examine the relationship between these data looking for potential dissonance. 3• Owner-managers should seek triggers to stimulate positive word-of-mouth communications and develop processes to minimise negative word-of-mouth communication and its impact

Consumer loyalty may be defined as a singular concept, usually as an attitude toward the loyalty object or as repeatpatronage behaviour; alternatively, the definition may combine attitude and behaviour in either an additive or an interactive expression. We argue that definitions of loyalty are useful if they predict phenomena such as recommendation, search and retention (loyalty outcomes). In three consumer fields, we find that combination measures of customer loyalty often perform poorly as predictors of loyalty outcomes compared with singular measures since recommendation is predicted by attitude but not by repeat patronage, whereas retention and search behaviour are predicted better by repeat patronage than by attitude. We also find that the prediction of loyalty outcomes is not improved by the inclusion of an interaction term in the model. On this evidence, we argue that combination concepts of loyalty are of limited value. Further, we find that there is no form of loyalty that consistently predicts all the different loyalty outcomes and, therefore, we should abandon the idea of a general concept of loyalty.

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