Customers' Influence Makes or Breaks Your Brand's Success Story – Quantifying Positive and Negative Social Influence in Online Customer Networks

Catherine Baethge, Julia Klier, Mathias Klier, Georg Lindner
2017
The ongoing proliferation of digital technologies is reshaping the customer-firm relationship by providing new possibilities for companies and customers to interact with each other. Companies try to involve customers in firm-sponsored online customer networks to connect them more deeply with the brand. In this context, the impact of positive social influence induced among customers on their value contribution has been acknowledged, however, research often neglects the impact of negative social
more » ... nfluence. We propose therefore a novel approach to account for direct and indirect as well as positive and negative social influence between customers in online customer networks to calculate customers' integrated value contribution. We demonstrate the applicability of our approach using an illustrative online customer network. Our approach allows practitioners to evaluate customers' "true" value in online customer networks by preventing over- and underestimation of customers' value contribution.
doi:10.5283/epub.36362 fatcat:k46wxs5d5jc25glggba23nbzma