The weak Haagerup property

We introduce the weak Haagerup property for locally compact groups and prove several hereditary results for the class of groups with this approximation property. The class contains a priori all weakly amenable groups and groups with the (usual) Haagerup property, but examples are given of groups with the weak Haagerup property which are not weakly amenable and do not have the Haagerup property. In the second part of the paper we introduce the weak Haagerup property for finite von Neumann algebras, and we prove several hereditary results here as well. Also, a discrete group has the weak Haagerup property if and only if its group von Neumann algebra does. Finally, we give an example of two II_1 factors with different weak Haagerup constants.