Research On Group Influential Mechanisms Of Industry Group Marketing And Strategy Of Customer Network Embeddedness

Human beings are social animals,and everyone make behavioral decisions based on the groups that they embed in.Therefore,companies have had a thorough understanding about how to make use of group interactions in customer groups to affect customer’s consumption behavior.Group marketing is a marketing paradigm that exploits the groups’ impact in the customer group to explore customer value.With the advent of the Internet age,the advantages of group marketing in terms of marketing efficiency and of marketing effectiveness have attracted the attention of numerous marketing scholars in the previous 30 years.Currently,literature in this field mainly focus on the consumer market and thus lack insight about industrial market.Based on previous research,our study sorts out the relevant research on the group influence mechanism during the past 30 years,and regards the information transmission mechanism,social identification mechanism and economic constraint mechanism—involved in word-of-mouth marketing,brand community and group purchase research—as effective mechanisms of group influence,explaining the connotations and mechanisms of group marketing thoroughly.Taking the bank’s supply chain financial business as the main research object,from the perspective of motivation,this paper demonstrates that the bank’s supply chain financial business utilizes the group influence of the customer group and provides such customer value to the network member,which correspond with the motivation of cooperation,and thus achieving value recognition of the overall supply chain network.Specifically,such research can analyze connotations of three mechanisms of groups influence—“economic benefits”,“information transfer” and “social identity” —in the business network and their impact on transaction costs,make analysis about how various elements of structural dimension,relationship dimension and cognitive dimension in business network have impact on group influence mechanisms,as well as considering the impact of market factors of the industry in which the business network is located and of institutional factors in the macro environment on group influence mechanisms.Our research explores the ways in which banks employ the influence of groups in their supply chain to reduce transaction costs;this paper also analyzes the methods that the size of banks,the features of supply chain network and the market environment affect the group embedding strategy of marketing companies,combined with the bank’s own resources and market factors;our paper further explores the approaches that different types of banks choose group marketing strategies based on features of supply chain and of market environment in which the supply chain is located,as well as making analysis about the methods to choose the appropriate embedded supply chain network model timely.Study 1 employs a single case exploratory case analysis,taking Ping An Bank conducting supply chain financial business as an example,through the case evidence data of the interrelationship among subjects of the bank supply chain network,this study proposes three findings.First,the economic relationship among members of the supply chain network,makes it possible that the group’s group marketing activities can rely on the economic interests of the members to affect behaviors of the members.Next,with regard to the information transmission mechanism,the industrial group marketing carried out by the banks focuses on the identification of members in the supply chain network,and whether the emphasis on the reputation of the circle can be implicitly constrained to inhibit the opportunistic behavior of these enterprises when dealing with banks.Finally,in terms of social identity mechanism,in addition to utilizing group members’ self-identity on group identity to reduce their speculative behaviors,banks also exploit the “reputation spillover” mechanism to enhance the bank’s sense of identity for all members of the group(i.e.transfer the recognition of core companies to SMEs in the supply chain),considering the mechanism that commercial norms of the supply chain can restrict the mechanism of SMEs to reduce the risk of bank loans,thus realizing savings of post-event transaction cost,which makes the bank more motivated to carry out group marketing.On the basis of Study 1,Study 2 exploits a multi-case exploratory research approach to compare and analyze six domestic banks,combing and sorting these case data,as well as combining industry scale and supply chain network involved in the industrial market,structural characteristics and macroeconomic background,this study finds that the embedded supply chain network is the manifestation of bank group marketing ability.From the perspective of economic environment factors,market factors,and the impact of supply chain characteristics on supply chain capital management needs,study 2 analyzes the strengths of the marketing enterprise,the characteristics of the target business network and the market environment which affects the marketing group’s group embedding strategy,combined with the bank’s own resources and market factors.That is to say,the bank’s strategies to embedded group in industrial market has two types of network embedding modes: N+1 and 1+N.“1+N” means that “first cooperate with a core enterprise in the supply chain,and then extend to other N small and medium-sized enterprises in the supply chain”."N+1" network embedding mode means that "first cooperate with N small and medium-sized enterprises in the supply chain,and then gradually bind the core enterprises in the supply chain".Different types of banks can select the best group embedding strategy based on the characteristics of the supply chain and of the market environment in which the supply chain is located,and can choose the “1+N” mode and the “N+1”mode to embed the supply chain at the right time.This research concludes that the bank should use group influence mechanism in the supply chain network to identify the valuable network,making comprehensive consideration of the cost reduction by the effective identification of the economic constraint mechanism,the information transfer mechanism and the social identification mechanism,but also make selections about appropriate embedded “1+N”or “N+1” strategy according to the industry scale,embedded network structure and economic situation in the industrial market,which can definitely provide theoretical and practical implications for expanding the target market,improving performance and efficiency,as well as reducing industry risks and transaction costs.