Expert or Star: Use Product Class Knowledge and Social Tie to Discriminate the Types of Opinion Leaders.
Date Issued
2008
Date
2008
Author(s)
Tsung, Pei-Cheng
Abstract
The interpersonal communication is one important source of product information which consumer respect for, and it is the most efficient marketing strategy to deliver product information through positive Word-of-Mouth. Opinion leaders play a key role in interpersonal communication. According to two-step flow of communication theory, the information flows from mass media to opinion leaders at first, and then it flows to someone else via opinion leaders. Therefore how to find out opinion leaders and how to influence them is an important issue to marketers.esearchers have made a lot of discussion about the measurements and characteristics of opinion leaders, but they didn’t pay much attention on how to discriminate opinion leaders. According to past studies, “product class knowledge” and “social ties” are two major characteristics those opinion leaders generally posses. The main goal of my thesis is to discuss that under different levels of product class knowledge or social tie, what kind of personality do opinion leaders have, and how they influence others. This thesis use travel products for example, and utilizes conjoint analysis to measure the distance of individual and group’s preference structure as an index of opinion leadership. Then we discuss the relationship between subjective knowledge, experiential knowledge, and in-degree centrality from social network analysis with degree of opinion leadership. This thesis also separates opinion leaders into “Powerful opinion leaders,” “Social opinion leaders,” “Expert opinion leaders,” and “Inactivate opinion leaders” by product class knowledge and social tie. Finally the main idea is on the difference of each type of opinion leaders in locus of control, self-monitoring and need for cognition.ccording to experimental result, subjective knowledge, experiential knowledge, and in-degree centrality have positive effect to the degree of opinion leadership. Powerful opinion leaders, with high degree of product class knowledge and social tie, are highly self-monitoring and eager for others’ cognition. Social opinion leaders, with high degree of social tie but low degree of knowledge, are also highly self-monitoring. Inactivate opinion leaders, with low degree of knowledge and social tie, are good at internal control and highly self-monitoring. Marketers can use these results to adjust the channel, advertising and promotion strategy, also they can utilize these different characteristics to contact with and influence on each type of opinion leaders, and then let them to influence on more consumers. Therefore, the marketing strategy can be practiced more efficient.
Subjects
opinion leader
product class knowledge
social tie
conjoint analysis
social network analysis
Type
thesis
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