Discovering heterogeneous consumer journeys in online platforms: implications for networking investment

Ho Kim (), Juncai Jiang () and Norris I. Bruce ()
Additional contact information
Ho Kim: University of Missouri-St. Louis
Juncai Jiang: Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
Norris I. Bruce: University of Texas at Dallas

Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 2021, vol. 49, issue 2, No 8, 374-396

Abstract: 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 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11747-020-00741-3 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:joamsc:v:49:y:2021:i:2:d:10.1007_s11747-020-00741-3

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.springer ... gement/journal/11747

DOI: 10.1007/s11747-020-00741-3

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science is currently edited by John Hulland, Anne Hoekman and Mark Houston

More articles in Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().