Discovering heterogeneous consumer journeys in online platforms: implications for networking investment
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ORIGINAL EMPIRICAL RESEARCH
Discovering heterogeneous consumer journeys in online platforms: implications for networking investment Ho Kim 1
&
Juncai Jiang 2 & Norris I. Bruce 3
Received: 14 June 2019 / Accepted: 22 July 2020 # Academy of Marketing Science 2020
Abstract We model consumer journeys for user-created programs published in an online programming platform (OPP) and uncover factors that predict their occurrence. We build our model on a theoretical framework where consumer journeys involve three latent stages (Learn, Feel, Do), in which users gather information about, express fondness toward, and try the published items, respectively. Using a dataset from an OPP where users publish multimedia items and follow other users, we find that there is no one dominant consumer journey; instead, the sequences of stages in a journey (e.g., Learn → Feel → Do) vary across published items. Furthermore, we find that the social capital (i.e., social network) of a publisher influences the occurrence of spillover effects between latent stages (the phenomenon that one stage in a period triggers another stage in the next period) for the items posted by the publisher. We also find that a publisher’s social capital has only a transient impact on the consumer journeys for the publisher’s projects, underlining the importance of consistently making new network connections in order to promote the growth of user activities surrounding the publisher’s projects. We apply our findings to the publishers’ networking investment decisions to show that publishers’ networking investment would be severely suboptimal if journey heterogeneity is not considered. Keywords Consumer journey . Online platform . User activity metrics . Social influence . Spillover effect . Sequential Monte Carlo methods . Dynamic latent instrumental variable . Networking investment
Introduction Firms doing business on online platforms are often keen to map consumer journeys, the diverse sequences of activities via which consumers learn about, express attitudes toward, Shrihari Sridhar served as Area Editor for this article * Ho Kim [email protected] Juncai Jiang [email protected] Norris I. Bruce [email protected] 1
University of Missouri-St. Louis, 1 University Blvd., St. Louis, MO 63121, USA
2
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 880West Campus Dr., Blacksburg, VA 24061, USA
3
University of Texas at Dallas, P.O. Box 830688, Richardson, TX 75083, USA
and experience products in online markets. Mapping can help firms uncover the types of investments that facilitate customer movement along the stages of a journey and the potential synergies (or spillovers) among them. Fortunately, the data required to map consumer journeys online is readily available in the form of user activity metrics about posted items and products. YouTube, for example, tracks a number of user activity metrics, such as the number of views, likes, and forwards of posted videos. Thingiverse, Zatista, and Etsy provide social networking features as well as such functionaliti
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