An examination into the extent that word of mouth has on the buying decisions of consumers with disabilities

The purpose of this paper is to attempt to understand how WOM affects upon people with disabilities in regards to their purchasing decisions of specialist products and services. In order to achieve this there will be an attempt to discover the importance of WOM when people with disabilities are purchasing specialist products and services, and also discovers the different ways the people who different impairments receive WOM information. The main methods employed to generate the results were: a chosen research approach of qualitative, the population in the study was selected by the non-probability sampling method called purposive sampling technique which is homogeneous sampling. The chosen data collection method was to use Facebook for asynchronous communication by e-mailing participates the interview over the platform. The chosen analytical approach was thematic analysis and then axial coding which was followed by a deductive reasoning approach was used in order to develop a hypothesis. The main themes to emerge from the data collected were: NWOM has twice the impact on consumers’ decision making process, the respondents still would possibly react negative to PWOM, WOM would have more effect than advertising, higher trust placed in friends and the existing users of products/services over experts and salespeople, respondents preferred to obtain WOM in the pre-purchasing phase of buying products and services in order to reduce the risk of buying products or signing up to services, high prices can evoke NWOM, market mavens with disabilities could spread WOM, the best to access WOM was via electronic forms. The overall conclusion was that WOM was very influential when people with disabilities are purchasing products and services.