Proposed SNA on Customer Behavior

Yingna Wu

Exchange student blog entry

Background

The survey found that more than 50% of people would like to gather information on line, before purchasing electronic product. And 68% of consumers will consult opinions from friends and families before purchase of any household appliances.

New research is underscoring the influence of social networks in marketing. Researchers at Telenor, a mobile phone carrier in Scandanaia, developed a map of social connections based on calling patterns between subscribers to analyze the adoption of the iPhone since 2007.

The research showed that an individual with just one iPhone-owing friend was three times more likely to own one themselves than someone whose friend had no iPhones. Individuals with two friends who had iPhones were more than five times as likely to have purchased an iPhone. So before promotion of new products, it is necessary to have a good understanding of customer behaviors.

Objective

From the point of view of the social network, marketing is getting closer to the nature of the market. We may find that how friend-valued effect works by

-Exposing & understanding customer needs deeply and truly;

-Finding the “opinion leaders” from customer data;

-Reevaluating value customer;

-Targeting customer & drawing up more practical marketing strategy.

Data required

I. Demographics

-Gender

-Age

-Marriage

-City lived in

-Email

-Face book

II “Quality of life” data base

-Expenditure on electronic products

How many different types of electronic products owned?

-Hobbies

-Salary level

-Professional sector

III How likely I sit that you would recommend the product to other?

-Friends

-Family members

-Colleagues

Measures

By finding degree centrality, closeness centrality, betweenness centrality to confirm which customers

-have high level of satisfaction with product

-highly likely to recommend product to others

-highly connected to other potential buyers

-highly influential, an opinion leaders

-are true lifetime value customers

Conclusion & Limitation

SNA transferred “one-to-one” marketing to “one-to (one in all)”.It could be clearer to find out the “opinion leaders”& true value customers by using UCINET, which will help us to target customers & draw up more practical strategy.

However, SNA focuses on the connection between people only, but not many other internal factors, such as intrinsic motivation of customer behavior. Therefore the result may have a good chance to be biased.