مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد ظهور شبکه های اجتماعی الکترونیکی – الزویر ۲۰۱۸

There is virtually no industry for which consumers’ post-consumption satisfaction is unimportant. Consumer experience gets communicated through various channels and affects prospective sales of the product. The raise of modern digital telecommunication technologies has made the maintenance of large number of social contacts easier. As a consequence, a modern individual maintains larger number of links to the rest of the society. The shift of large part of communication from offline to online environments, which aids the proliferation of opinion leaders, and where conversation records stay for longer period, has also altered the conventional routs through which word-of-mouth circulates. Such social changes, brought by advances in electronic social networks, could potentially transform the economic system. The current paper investigates the implications of these changes in social structures for the link between advertising and sales. Word-of-mouth (WoM hereafter) is particularly important in industries where consumers are not certain about the quality of the product they are purchasing. This collects service and information goods industries. In the case of the former, the quality of the service is largely affected by personal factors and, therefore, has large variance. In the case of the latter, the nature of the product on sale cannot be exhaustively verified. Examples of the industries in the first group are haircuts, taxi or other services. Examples of those in the second group are motion pictures, books, software etc. In the case of the first group we deal with the repetitive purchases but information about the quality is not easily elicited from previous experience due to the large variance in quality of delivery. In the second case we deal with non-repetitive purchases, therefore, eliciting the quality from the previous purchase is impossible. In all of these industries consumers rely heavily on word-ofmouth (Anderson, 1998; Godes and Mayzlin, 2004; Joshi and Musalem, 2012). There is an ample evidence that consumers in more conventional industries like electronics and apparel are also heavily influenced by WoM (Campbell, 2013). In fact, for a very large and diverse set of industries the information collected through interaction with other consumers is the most reliable piece of knowledge shoppers base their decisions on (Babutsidze, 2012). Consumer satisfaction is believed to be particularly important for repetitive purchases as consumers base their decisions on past experience. However, sales of any product are stretched over time. This gives early adopters the opportunity to communicate their product reviews to consumers who have not made their choice yet. In this vain, negative experiences of early consumers might seriously damage producer’s prospects even in the case of non-repetitive purchases. Besides prices, consumers’ purchase decisions are also affected by other factors. Advertising is arguably the most important of those (Nelson, 1974). Much like WoM, advertising is based on information transfer. Unlike WoM, however, advertising is a purposeful action with a clear aim to induce consumers to buy the product.