Role of opinion leaders in Purchase process
Opinion Leadership is the process through which an opinion leader impacts the actions or attitudes of others, who may be opinion seekers or just opinion receivers. Opinion recipients see the opinion leader as a very reputable, impartial source of product knowledge who may assist them in reducing their search and analysis time as well as their perceived risk.
Opinion leaders are driven to provide information or advise to others because it improves their own status and self-image, and because such guidance tends to decrease any post-purchase dissonance that they may have. Other motivations include product participation, message engagement, and any other kind of involvement. Opinion leaders are identified by market researchers using techniques such as self-designation, key informants, the sociometric approach, and the objective method.
According to studies of opinion leadership, this phenomenon tends to be product category specific, typically one of their interests. An opinion leader in one product area may be an opinion receiver in another. Opinion leaders are often outgoing, self-assured, inventive individuals who like talking. Furthermore, individuals may feel distinct from others and prefer to behave differently (or public individuation).
They learn about their areas of interest by reading special interest periodicals and ezines and participating in new product testing.
Because their interests often overlap into neighboring fields, their opinion leadership may likewise expand into those areas.
What exactly is a market maven?
The market maven is an extreme example of an opinion leader. These customers have a wealth of knowledge about a broad variety of items, retail venues, and market dimensions They initiate conversations with other customers and reply to market information inquiries for a broad variety of goods and services.
Market mavens differ from other opinion leaders in that their impact originates not so much from product experience as it does from a broader understanding or market expertise that leads to an early awareness of a diverse range of new goods and services.
The opinion leadership process is often carried out among friends, neighbours, and coworkers who are in close physical vicinity and so have abundant chance to engage in informal product-related talks. These discussions normally happen organically in the context of product-category use.
The two-step flow of communication hypothesis emphasises the significance of interpersonal impact in information transmission from the mainstream media to the general public. This theory serves as the basis for a new multi-step flow of communication model that recognises that information and influence are often two-way processes and that opinion leaders both influence and are impacted by opinion receivers.
Marketers must divide their audiences into opinion leaders and opinion receivers for their respective product categories. When marketers can focus their promotional efforts to the more important sectors of these marketplaces, the information will be sent to individuals seeking product recommendations.
Marketers attempt to mimic and inspire opinion leadership. They have also discovered that by picking socially active or prominent individuals and purposefully enhancing their excitement for a product category, they can develop opinion leaders for their items.
The diffusion and adoption processes are two closely linked concepts that deal with client acceptance of new items.
The diffusion process is a large-scale process that focuses on the transmission of an invention from its source to the general audience.
The adoption process is a microprocess that analyses the phases that an individual customer goes through while deciding whether to accept or reject a new product.
The definition of the term innovation can be
- Firm oriented (new to the firm),
- Product oriented (a continuous innovation, a dynamically continuous innovation, or A discontinuous innovation),
- Market oriented (how long the product has been on the market or an arbitrary percentage of the potential target market that has purchased it), or
- Consumer oriented (new to the customer).
Market-oriented definitions of innovation are most useful to consumer researchers in the study of the diffusion and adoption of new products.
Five Product Characteristics influence the consumers acceptance of a new product:
- Relative Advantage
- Compatibility
- Complexity
- Trialability
- Observability
Diffusion researchers are concerned with 2 aspects of communication – the channels through which word about a new product or service is spread to the public and the types of messages that influence the adoption or rejection of new products or services.
Diffusion is always examined in the context of a specific social system, such as a target market, a community, a region or even a nation.
Time is an integral consideration in the diffusion process. Researchers are concerned with the amount of purchase time required for an individual customer to adopt or reject a new product/service, with the rate of adoptions and with the identification of sequential adopters.
The 5 adopter categories are innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority and laggards.
Marketing Strategists try to control the rate of adoption through their new product pricing policies. Companies who wish to penetrate the market to achieve market leaderships try to acquire wide adoption as quickly as possible by using low prices. Those who wish to recoup their developmental costs quickly use a skimming pricing policy but lengthen the adoption process.
The traditional adoption process model describes 5 stages through which an individual consumer passes to arrive at the decision to adopt or reject a new product:
- Awareness,
- Interest,
- Evaluation
- Trial
- Adoption
To make it more realistic, an enhanced model is recommended, which takes into account the possibility of a pre-existing need or problem, the likelihood that some form of evaluation will occur throughout the entire process, and the possibility that post-adoption or purchase evaluation will occur, which could either strengthen the commitment or lead to the discontinuation of the product/service.
Companies promoting new goods are keenly interested in finding the consumer innovator so that they may target their promotional activities to those most likely to test new items, adopt them, and encourage others.
Consumer Research has identified a number of consumer-related characteristics, such as product interest, opinion leadership, personality factors, purchase and consumption traits, media habits, social characteristics, and demographic variables, that differentiate consumer innovators from late adopters. These characteristics are important in market segmentation for new product debuts.