The renowned International Journal of Research in Marketing (IJRM) lists two scientific publications by Prof. Marchand and his co-authors among the most frequently cited articles since 2017 (see here). One of them is about gamification and we already reported on him a few days ago. The other article is about a differentiation of word of mouth (WOM) and is applied to the video game industry.
Consumer communication about brands and products nowadays takes place on different platforms and in different forms. Two important digital WOM types are microblogs and consumer reviews. To clarify their different roles for product success, this study develops a theoretical framework for the influence of these two types of WOM, based on both consumer information search theory and diffusion theory. To empirically test this framework, the researchers use a longitudinal dataset of video game sales and weekly information from microblogs (over 13 million tweets from Twitter) and consumer reviews (more than 17,000 Amazon customer reviews).
The comparative analysis shows that the influence of microblogs and consumer reviews on new product successes changes over time. Prior to product release, the volumes of microblogs and consumer reviews, along with advertising, are primary sales. After product release, the volume of microblogs is initially influential, then the effect decreases as the impact of the volume of consumer reviews increases. The valence of consumer reviews only gains importance at the end of the period under study, but the valence of microblogging is at no point influential. "Our findings have an impact on marketing managers because they help companies to focus their efforts on the information sources that consumers use most when making decisions at different points in time," explains Prof. Marchand.
This second publication can be found here.