The Role of Opinion Leaders in the Sustainable Development of Corporate-Led Consumer Advice Networks: Evidence from a Chinese Travel Content Community

Lianren Wu, Jinjie Li, Jiayin Qi, Deli Kong and Xu Li
Additional contact information
Lianren Wu: School of Management, Shanghai University of International Business and Economics, Shanghai 200336, China
Jinjie Li: School of Tourism Management, Shanghai Normal University, Shanghai 201418, China
Jiayin Qi: Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Change Management, Shanghai University of International Business and Economics, Shanghai 200336, China
Deli Kong: School of Business and Management, Shanghai International Studies University, Shanghai 201620, China
Xu Li: YunlianZhigao (Beijing) Information Technology Research Institute Co., Ltd., Beijing 100086, China

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 19, 1-20

Abstract: Online community marketing and social media influencer marketing have aroused the interest of many researchers and practitioners around the world. Companies building online content communities to implement community marketing and influencer marketing has become a new corporate strategy, especially in the tourism and hotel industries in which experiential products are sold. However, based on the content community, maintaining the sustainable development of a consumer advice network composed of opinion leaders and consumers is a major challenge. This paper selects the travel content community of Qunar.com as the research object to study the role of opinion leaders in the sustainable development of corporate-led consumer advice networks (CANs). Empirical evidence based on network evolution data from 1356 “Hotel Sleep Testers” across 11 years shows that: (1) the creation and provision of information can obviously increase the probability of the relationship construction and increase the number of relationships, thus facilitating the formation of opinion leadership (OL); (2) active participation in interactions and withhigh-quality information brings greater effects; (3) the network structure variables, such as preferential attachment, structural equivalence, and similarity, can also better predict the probability of a potential relationship; and (4) reciprocity in consumer advice networks has no significant impact on the establishment of network relationships.

Keywords: content community; sustainable marketing; SMIs marketing; consumer advice network; opinion leaders; network structure (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/19/11128/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/19/11128/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:13:y:2021:i:19:p:11128-:d:652054

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().