Unleashing the Power of Word of Mouth: Creating Brand Advocacy to Drive Growth

Keller, Ed

doi:10.2501/s0021849907070468

Cited by 253 publications

(169 citation statements)

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“…They aim to provoke marketer-directed cascades of word-of-mouth (WOM). In that way, referral programs leverage on the powerful impact of WOM and the influence of social connections [17,21]. Figure 1 illustrates how referral marketing programs create value for firms.…”

Section: The Referral Marketing Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Many have shifted part of their marketing efforts portfolio from directly communicating with potential customers to incentivizing existing customers to do so [16]. This is driven by the growing acceptance of the fact that people are highly influenced by information received from others [17] and that word-of-mouth (WOM) is the most influential source of information to a customer [21]. Empirical research confirmed that consumers rely heavily on the advice of others in their personal network when making purchase decisions [19,36,32,20,33] and that positive WOM has a positive effect on business outcomes, i.e.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Identifying influencers in a social network: The value of real referral data

Roelens

Baecke

Benoit

2016

Decision Support Systems

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Individuals influence each other through social interactions and marketers aim to leverage this interpersonal influence to attract new customers. It still remains a challenge to identify those customers in a social network that have the most influence on their social connections. A common approach to the influence maximization problem is to simulate influence cascades through the network based on the existence of links in the network using diffusion models. Our study contributes to the literature by evaluating these principles using real-life referral behaviour data. A new ranking metric, called Referral Rank, is introduced that builds on the game theoretic concept of the Shapley value for assigning each individual in the network a value that reflects the likelihood of referring new customers. We also explore whether these methods can be further improved by looking beyond the one-hop neighbourhood of the influencers. Experiments on a large telecommunication data set and referral data set demonstrate that using traditional simulation based methods to identify influencers in a social network can lead to suboptimal decisions as the results overestimate actual referral cascades. We also find that looking at the influence of the two-hop neighbours of the customers improves the influence spread and product adoption. Our findings suggest that companies can take two actions to improve their decision support system for identifying influential customers : (1) improve the data by incorporating data that reflects the actual referral behaviour of the customers or (2) extend the method by looking at the influence of the connections in the two-hop neighbourhood of the customers.

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Section: The Referral Marketing Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Identifying influencers in a social network: The value of real referral data

Roelens

Baecke

Benoit

2016

Decision Support Systems

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“…WOM activity is defined as "informal communications directed at other consumers about the ownership, usage, or characteristics of particular goods and services and/or their sellers" (Westbrook 1987, p. 261). Similarly, Arndt (1967, p. 291 WOM is a powerful marketing tool, and some believe it is the most effective method of reaching consumers (Keller 2007). Many consumers view WOM as a more trustworthy, authentic, and easily accessible source of information, especially when compared to companysponsored advertising (Borgida and Nisbett 1977;Brown and Reingen 1987;Day 1971;Murray 1991;Silverman 1997).…”

Section: Traditional Word Of Mouthmentioning

confidence: 99%

Investigating E-Servicescape, Trust, E-WOM, and Customer Loyalty

Tran

Strutton

2016

Celebrating America’s Pastimes: Baseball, Hot Dogs, Apple Pie and Marketing?

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titles.Old Spice cleverly used a handsome actor to play the Old Spice Man character for a Super Bowl commercial in 2010. After the game, this Old Spice commercial was viewed more than 13 million times on YouTube, a social media video-sharing site. This viral marketing campaign, also known as electronic word-of-mouth (E-WOM), propelled the Old Spice brand into the forefront of consumers' minds, increased brand awareness, and inspired people to share the video links with their family, friends, and co-workers.The rapid growth of E-WOM is an indication of consumers' increased willingness to convey marketing messages to others. However, despite this development, marketing academics and practitioners do not fully understand this powerful form of marketing. This dissertation enriches our understanding of E-WOM and how e-servicescape may lead to E-WOM. To that end, stimulus-organism-response theory and the network co-production model of E-WOM are applied to investigate the relationships between e-servicescape, trust, E-WOM intentions, customer loyalty, and purchase intentions. Two forms of E-WOM were examined, namely emails and social network postings. E-servicescape is defined as the online environmental factors of a marketer's website. E-servicescape is composed of three main dimensions, including aesthetic appeal, financial security, and layout and functionality. This study used cross-sectional customer data from a single e-tailer. Structural equation modeling was used to analyze the responses. Customer reviews was added as an additional subdimension of e-servicescape. The findings suggest e-servicescape positively impacts trust, which in turn positively influences E-WOM and customer loyalty. Moreover, two groups of customers were compared using multi-group analysis, where one group of users received emails and the other group received social network postings from the same e-tailer. Overall, the results indicated emails had a stronger impact on e-servicescape, E-WOM, and customer loyalty. Social networking site postings had slightly greater influence on trust, and two sub-dimensions of eservicescape, i.e., interactivity and ease of payment.These findings contribute to the marketing research on E-WOM theory and electronic commerce shopping behavior. In particular, the sub-dimension of customer reviews is added to e-servicescape. This study yields practical implications for marketers in understanding consumers' perceptions of websites and how to better design sites. In addition, these findings add to knowledge on how to engender consumers' trust and customer loyalty online. Finally, this research provides suggestions for firms wanting to create marketing campaigns that will lead to E-WOM. Overview of E-WOM E-WOM is defined as "forwarding actions through email, instant messaging or other communication media that are of high 'addressability'" (Ho and Dempsey 2010, p. 1000). E-WOM communication is traditional word-of-mouth (WOM) behavior evolved and adapted to electronic media, where individuals often convey messages in...

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“…DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/JRME-07-2015-0039 (Bjerke & Hultman, 2002). Some entrepreneurial marketing tactics include word of mouth marketing (Keller, 2007), viral marketing (Hinz, Skiera, Barrot, & Becker, 2011) and buzz marketing (Hausmann, 2012;Thomas, 2004). While analysing the marketing practices of successful entrepreneurs, Stokes (2000) found that they tend to serve a small base of customers and expand based on resource availability.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Social enterprises are considered a possible future strategy to address a previously untapped and unrecognized market in developing economies (Bruton, 2010;Mair & Martí, 2006;Seelos & Mair, 2005, 2007. However, social enterprises might face resource shortages because of their primary focus on a social mission (Wei-Skillern, Austin, Leonard, & Stevenson, 2007).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bricolage in the marketing efforts of a social enterprise

Kannampuzha

Suoranta

2016

JRME

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Structured AbstractPurpose -The article aims to understand how resource constraints are addressed in the development of a marketing strategy by a social enterprise.Methodology -The authors have used an in-depth case study of collaboration between a Finnish university and an Indian social enterprise as the methodology for our research in which the data were collected over a period of two years. The data involve semi-structured interviews, field notes and student reports.Findings -The authors propose bricolage as a method of marketing ingenuity in resource-constrained social enterprises. Network bricolage and entrepreneurship education bricolage were identified as two mechanisms adopted to address resource constraints in the early stage of the development of a social enterprise.Research limitations/ implications -Network bricolage is a type of bricolage in which an entrepreneur utilizes existing personal and professional networks as a resource at hand. Whereas networking and resource leveraging imply that the founders of an organization pursue resources from previously unknown people, network bricolage involves already known contacts of the entrepreneur. Further studies need to be conducted to test the applicability of network bricolage among a variety of small and medium-sized enterprises and start-ups. Bricolage could be explored in more detail as an alternative to resource leveraging to understand the marketing activities of social businesses in their initial stages.Practical implications -Another type of bricolage that the authors observed was entrepreneurship education bricolage. A combination of students, business mentors and university resources such as faculty members was utilized as an ingenuity mechanism to develop creative solutions for a shortage of marketing resources.Originality/value -The theoretical framework of entrepreneurial bricolage is applied in the context of the marketing of a social enterprise.

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Unleashing the Power of Word of Mouth: Creating Brand Advocacy to Drive Growth

Cited by 253 publications

References 0 publications

Identifying influencers in a social network: The value of real referral data

Identifying influencers in a social network: The value of real referral data

Investigating E-Servicescape, Trust, E-WOM, and Customer Loyalty

Bricolage in the marketing efforts of a social enterprise

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