Referral reward programs (RRPs) are customarily used by firms to acquire new customers. This study treats RRPs as a tool for customer relationship management. Study 1 confirms through field experimentation that word-of-mouth referrals induced by RRPs can strengthen the affective commitment of existing customers to the enterprise. Studies 2 and 3 examined how reward size, reward targets, and referral methods influence the attitude of customers from the perspectives of the positive reinforcement theory, the self-perception theory, and the cognitive dissonance theory. The results indicate that for new customers, larger rewards promote greater affective commitment to the firm, whereas, for existing customers, reward size has no significant impact on their attitude. If RRPs require participants to tag referees, it can always induce consumers to maintain high affective commitment regardless of reward size. In other words, with different reward settings, the positive reinforcement theory and the cognitive dissonance theory can effectively explain changes in consumer attitude. In contrast, the self-perception theory has poor explanatory power.