Research On Social Marketing Reward And Diacount Strategies Based On Consumer Sharing Behavior

The rapid development and wide application of social media not only facilitates the communication between e-commerce firms and consumers,but also enables firms to use information sharing and interaction between consumers to carry out marketing.In recent years,social marketing based on consumer sharing behavior has been widely used in practice.Different from traditional e-marketing,the key to the implementation of social marketing is utilizing consumer sharing behavior,which requires firms to develop effective strategies to stimulate consumer sharing behavior.At present,the researches in this field are not enough.To this end,this dissertation constructs quantitative analysis models to study firms’ optimal design and selection of social marketing reward and discount strategies based on consumer sharing behavior.By defining social marketing and social marketing strategy and analyzing the mechanism of different social marketing strategies,this dissertation fulfills the following works:First,highlighting the social motives of consumer sharing behavior,firms’ referral reward programs in social marketing based on persuasive effect of consumer sharing behavior are investigated.The results show that,consumers’ social utility helps the firm avoid excessive rewards by sharing rewards burden.The referral reward program for consumer sharing behavior is not always effective.Under certain conditions,purely relying on consumers’ spontaneous referrals motivated by their social utility is optimal for the firm.When referral reward program is effective,the firm’s optimal reward structure is closely related to the tie-strength between the sender and the receiver.Concretely,when the tie-strength is weak,the firm tends to reward the sender more;conversely,the firm tends to reward the receiver more.The dissertation further takes the impact of innovativeness of product on consumer sharing behavior into account to study firms’ optimal referral reward programs.The results show that the referral reward program is more suitable for the products with medium innovativeness,and low innovativeness are more likely to trigger consumers’ spontaneous referrals.Moreover,the optimal rewards increase with the innovativeness of the referred product when the firm opts to use the referral reward program.Second,this dissertation studies firms’ optimal threshold reward strategies in social marketing based on the informative effect of consumer sharing behavior.The results indicate that the incentive effect of firm-offered-reward on consumers conforms to the law of diminishing marginal utility.Without considering the difference in receivers’ responses,the optimal threshold reward strategy is influenced by the value of consumer unit pageview,the sharing preference of sharers and the structure of relationship between sharers and their friends.On the whole,with the improvement of the value of consumer unit pageview,the firm tends to adopt the reward structure with high threshold and high reward.With the law of diminishing marginal utility,the firm could be able to get higher returns actually by only seeking the output resulting from the browsing behavior of sharers’ close friends under some certain conditions.The optimal threshold reward strategy is also influenced by sharers’ social influence when considering receivers’ different responses,the higher social influence of sharers,the more the firm tends to adopt the reward structure with high threshold and high reward.Third,fully considering the persuasive effect and informative effect of consumer sharing behavior,this dissertation studies the optimal design of reward forms(even cash reward and delayed coupon reward)of referral reward program under different price strategies.The results indicate that when the unit referral cost of consumer is low and consumer repurchase rate is high,referral reward program is effective for the firm.Under the conditions that referral reward program is not effective for the firm,the pricing strategy with high price followed by low price is optimal.The reward program interacts with pricing strategy: when the firm adopts the pricing strategy with high price followed by low price,cash reward is optimal,and when the firm adopts the pricing strategy with low price followed by high price,coupon reward is optimal.With the increase of unit referral cost,the firm is more inclined to use the mixed strategy of the pricing strategy with low price followed by high price and RRP with rewards in coupon.Moreover,when the unit referral cost is extremely low,and the consumer repurchase rate is not high enough,the mixed strategy of the pricing strategy with high price followed by low price and cash reward is optimal for the firm.Then,this dissertation studies the firms’ optimal selection between “share-convert” reward mechanism and “share-click” reward mechanism.Under “share-convert” reward mechanism,the firm rewards the sharer when his or her sharing behavior produces product sale.Under “share-click” reward mechanism,the firm rewards the sharer when his or her sharing behavior produces valid browsing.The results show that,only when the consumer’s unit sharing cost is lower than a certain level can the firm benefit from the sharing reward mechanisms.Under this condition,when the unit sharing cost is at a higher level,the firm is also willing to pay the existing consumers the reward above price.Moreover,the higher the proportion of target consumers who demand the product,the more effective the “share-convert” reward mechanism is,and the firm is more inclined to choose “share-convert” reward mechanism,on the contrary,the firm is more inclined to choose “share-click” reward mechanism.Finally,with consideration of the motives of consumers participating in group buying,this dissertation studies firms’ sales mode selection and pricing strategies of social group buying.The results show that,the structure of consumers can exert impact on the optimal pricing strategy of each sales mode in the following ways: when the proportion of high-value consumers is high or the degree of valuation variance between the high-value consumers and the low-consumers is high,the firm tends to use high price strategy.Due to the influence of consumers’ altruistic motives,the equilibrium group-buying price in mixed sales mode is higher than the equilibrium group-buying price in pure social-group-buying sales mode.Overall speaking,social group buying mode is better than the individual buying mode.Moreover,the mixed sales mode is always better than the pure social-group-buying sales mode,and the consumer altruism preference positively affect firm’s optimal profits.Only in the case that the degree of valuation variance between the high-value consumers and the low-value consumers is in the high range,the condition under which the high price strategy in individual-buying sales mode is more effective than the mixed mode,further depends on both of the proportion of high-value consumers and the persuasion efficiency of the consumers.