Description
Influencer marketing is becoming a prevalent strategy adopted by firms to promote and sell products in recent years. Although such practice has attracted a growing interest in academia, relevant studies are largely empirical, while there is a lack of analytical studies. To address this gap, my research will focus on developing analytical models to investigate the influencer marketing strategy and obtain insights that help practitioners conduct influencer marketing campaigns more effectively. Specifically, I will study two related topics.The first topic is concerned with a firm’s decisions for the introduction of a new product through an online influencer. I develop a two-period product diffusion model to characterize the effect of the influencer and the word-of-mouth of her followers. In the first period, the influencer exerts an effort on social media platforms to promote the product to her followers and boost their interest and demand. In the second period, customers who do not follow the online influencer arrive in the market, and they may be influenced by the followers through word-of-mouth. For the cases of deterministic and stochastic demand statuses, I study the firm’s pricing and production decisions in each period, his incentive compensation plan for the influencer, as well as the influencer’s promotion effort decision. I also examine how the results are affected by the key model parameters.
The second topic will be related to the problem of influencer selection for product promotion. This is motivated by a common and important issue in influencer marketing regarding whether to work with macro influencers who have a large follower base but a low engagement rate, or micro influencers who have a small follower base but a high engagement rate. I will construct a model to capture the key factors that drive the decision and identify the major issues and insights for such decision.
Period | 18 May 2021 |
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Event title | Postgraduate Seminar Series |
Event type | Public Lecture |