In this paper the importance of word of mouth for marketing management in the twenty-first century will be discussed. After a short introduction, there will be a focus on the demarcations and problems of traditional marketing. Then, in the third section, word of mouth (WOM) and word-of-mouth...

In a viral marketing campaign an organization develops a marketing message, and stimulates customers to forward this message to their contacts. Despite its increasing popularity, there are no models yet that help marketers to predict how many customers a viral marketing campaign will reach, and...

A comprehensive simulation model is presented, aimed to show the dynamics of social diffusion based on the word of mouth (e.g.: viral marketing) over a social network of interconnected individuals. The model is build following a bottom-up approach and the agent based paradigm; this means that...

In a viral marketing campaign an organization develops a marketing message, and stimulates customers to forward this message to their contacts. Despite its increasing popularity, there are no models yet that help marketers to predict how many customers a viral marketing campaign will reach, and...

In a viral marketing campaign, an organization develops a marketing message and encourages customers to forward this message to their contacts. Despite its increasing popularity, there are no models yet that help marketers to predict how many customers a viral marketing campaign will reach and...

We investigate the evolution of online ratings over time and sequence. We first establish that there exist two distinct dynamic processes, one as a function of the amount of time a book has been available for review and another as a function of the sequence of reviews themselves. We find that,...

Whereas recent research has demonstrated the impact of online product ratings and reviews on product sales, we still have a limited understanding of the individual's decision to contribute these opinions. In this research, we empirically model the individual's decision to provide a product...

Managers are very interested in word-of-mouth communication because they believe that a product's success is related to the word of mouth that it generates. However, there are at least three significant challenges associated with measuring word of mouth. First, how does one gather the data?...

We investigate a business-to-business context and ask <i>when</i> and <i>why</i> a firm should announce a "reference program" that commits the firm to facilitating the flow of information about the efficacy of its products from early adopters to potential late adopters. We model a monopolist manufacturer with...

Under the sociological theory of homophily, people who are similar to one another are more likely to interact with one another. Marketers often have access to data on interactions among customers from which, with homophily as a guiding principle, inferences could be made about the underlying...