Referral Rewards Programs: A Longitudinal Comparison of Customer Generations

Many companies incentivize existing customers to recruit new ones by offering signup bonuses to both the referring and the referred customer. We observe a research gap regarding the longitudinal analysis of referral behavior across multiple generations of customers. We pose the question whether first- or later-generation customers differ in terms of their interaction with a firm and other behavioral domains? We therefore ask whether a referrer’s referee is also automatically a good referrer or not, yielding further insights into the subject of referral reward programs.