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Chap 11: Groups and Social Media - Coggle Diagram
Chap 11: Groups and Social Media
11-1 Other people and groups, especially those that possess social power, influence our decisions.
Social Power
Social power describes “the capacity to alter the actions of others.”
The following classification of power bases to distinguish among the reasons a person exerts power over another:
Referent power: is important to many marketing strategies because consumers voluntarily modify what they do and buy to identify with a referent.
Information power: A person possesses information power simply because he or she knows something others would like to know.
Legitimate power: The legitimate power a uniform confers wields authority in consumer contexts.
Expert power: Hawking’s expert power derives from the knowledge he possesses about a content area.
Reward power: A person or group with the means to provide positive reinforcement has reward power.
Coercive power: We exert coercive power when we influence someone because of social or physical intimidation.
Reference Groups
A reference group is an actual or imaginary individual or group that significantly influences an individual’s evaluations, aspirations, or behavior.
A membership reference group consists of people we actually know. In contrast although we don’t know those in an aspirational reference group, we admire them anyway.
Reference groups impact our buying decisions both positively and negatively. Sometimes, however, we also deliberately do the opposite if we want to distance ourselves from avoidance groups.
Conformity
Conformity is a change in beliefs or actions as a reaction to real or imagined group pressure.
Researchers term this the Red Sneakers Effect (to describe a brave person who sports a pair of red kicks in a professional setting).
Some common culprits:
Cultural pressures
Fear of deviance
Commitment
Group unanimity, size, and expertise
Susceptibility to interpersonal influence
Environmental cues
Brand Communities
A brand community is a group of consumers—like those zealous Halo players— who share a set of social relationships based on usage of or interest in a product.
Unlike other kinds of communities, these members typically don’t live near each other—except when they may meet for brief periods at organized events or brandfests that community-oriented companies such as Jeep or Harley-Davidson sponsor.
Researchers find that brand community members do more than help the product build buzz; their inputs actually create added value for themselves and other members as they develop better ways to use and customize products.
11-2 Word-of-mouth communication is the most important driver of product choice.
Word-of-mouth communication
Word-of-mouth (WOM) is product information that individuals transmit to other individuals.
WOM is especially powerful when the consumer is relatively unfamiliar with the product category.
As a rule, advertising is more effective to reinforce our existing product preferences than to create new ones.
Negative Wom
Consumers weigh negative word-of-mouth more heavily than they do positive comments
The British psychologist Frederic Bartlett used the method of serial reproduction to examine how content mutates.
Buzz Building
Stimulate WOM to build buzzaround a product or service, then sit back and let your customers do the heavy lifting
11-3 Opinion leaders’ recommendations are more influential than others when we decide what to buy.
How influential is an opinion leader?
The original framework is called the two-step flow model of influence. It proposes that a small group of influencers disseminates information because they can modify the opinions of a large number of a large number of other people.
These conversations create information cascades that occur when a piece of information triggers a sequence of interactions
Types of opinion leaders
Other characteristics of the men included the following:
They were socially active.
They were appearance conscious and narcissistic (i.e., they were quite fond of themselves and self-centered).
They were involved in rock culture.
They were heavy readers of magazines like Playboy and Sports Illustrated.
They were likely to own more clothing, and a broader range of styles, than other students.
Opinion leaders also are likely to be opinion seekers
The market maven
The Alaskan woman Vaseline found (no, she isn’t former Governor Sarah Palin) is a market maven; she is a person who likes to transmit marketplace information of all types.
They come closer to the function of a generalized opinion leader because they tend to have a solid overall knowledge of how and where to procure products.
The surrogate consumer
In addition to everyday consumers who influence others’ purchase decisions, a class of marketing intermediary we call the surrogate consumer often guides what we buy.
Regardless of whether they actually make the purchase on behalf of the consumer, surrogate consumers can be enormously influentia
The client essentially relinquishes control over several or all decision-making functions, such as information search, the evaluation of alternatives, or the actual purchase.
Sociometry: The kevin bacon phenomenon
A popular game called Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon challenges players to link the actor Kevin Bacon with other actors in much the same way.
Sociometric methods trace communication patterns among members of a group.
Sociometric techniques don't just look at who talks (or texts) to whom; they also consider the type of relationships among members of a social network.
Tie strength refers to the nature of the bond between people.
This referral process demonstrates the strength of weak tie
We use sociometric analyses to better understand referral behavior and to locate strengths and weaknesses in terms of how one’s reputation flows through a community.
11-4 Social media changes the way we learn about and select products.
Online social networks and brand communities
Let’s take a closer look at the underlying fabric of social media. Each online platform, such as Facebook, Pinterest, or Twitter, consists of a social network a set of socially relevant nodes connected by one or more relations.
Nodes are members of the network (e.g., the more than 1 billion Facebook users) who are connected to one another.
Social networks are sometimes called social graphs though this term may also refer to a diagram of the interconnections of units in a network.
Flows occur between nodes. Flows are exchanges of resources, information, or influence among members of the network.
In social media, these flows of communication go in many directions at any point in time and often on multiple platforms—a condition we term media multiplexity.
Successful online communities possess several important characteristics:
Standards of behavior
Member contributions
Degree of connectedness
Network effects
Digital word – of – mounth
Viral marketing occurs when an organization motivates visitors to forward online content to their friends.
The urge to share even creates new genres of communication.
The viral marketing explosion highlights the power of the Megaphone Effect.
Other researchers identified a somewhat similar phenomenon they call the Dispreferred Marker Effect.
Digital opinion leaders
In online groups, opinion leaders sometimes are called power users.
Forrester Research has dubbed these brand-specific mentions influence impressions.
Forrester calls these influencers mass connectors.