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From the Archives: All Levels of WOM Impact New Product Acceptance
Despite assumptions of inferiority, the effects of weak ties approximate or exceed the effects of strong ties in all stages of a product's life cycle, according to research findings by Jacob Goldenberg, Barak Libai and Eitan Muller published in the August 2001 edition of Marketing Letters.
Other findings:
* External marketing efforts are effective at the front-end of a new product cycle, but their effectiveness quickly drops off
* After external marketing efforts lose efficacy, strong and weak ties become the main forces that push product growth
* Results indicate that information dissemination is dominated less by advertising and more by strong and weak WOM
* The effects of strong ties diminish as personal network size decreases. When personal networks are small, weak ties have a stronger impact on the spread of information than strong ties