受众心理落差与口碑传播对广告策略的影响

Influence of disconfirmation and word-of-mouth on advertising strategy

在口碑传播受到顾客心理落差因素的影响下,研究厂商的最优定价与营销决策,我们构建了口碑传播的两阶段模型,分析了顾客质量预期可以被厂商通过广告直接控制、或者通过口碑传播间接影响的情况下,心理落差因素与广告成本对公司最优广告强度策略、定价策略以及利润的影响。运用逆向归纳法得到了厂商最优广告投放强度与定价策略的精确解。研究表明心理落差敏感类型顾客所占比例和敏感程度都对公司最优决策及利润有着重要影响,并通过算例进一步验证了结论的可靠性。

As an important methodof propagating and distributing product information,word-of-mouth significantly influences consumers＇ purchase decisions and has attracted tremendous research interests from academia. Since the 1960 s, researchers have gradually reached some consensus on the motivation and influential factors of word-of-mouth.Moreover, the related empirical studies have achieved rich results as well. However, relatively few researchers have studied this topic by developing analytical models.Consumers＇ prior expectation on the product quality is usually assumed to be given in the literature. Very few papers assume it to bethe firm＇s controllable variable or consider the influence of discrepancy between the prior expectation and the actual performance on word-of-mouth. Based on the previous studies, this paper converts consumers＇ expected quality into products＇ advertised quality, which can be directly controlled by advertising or indirectly influenced by word-of-mouth. In addition, we consider the discrepancy between the prior expectation and the actual performance. Sensitive to this discrepancy and the level of discrepancy sensitivity are introduced into our model as two significant exogenous variables. We build a two-stage model and obtain the advertised optimal quality and pricing strategy. Influences of ad cost, and discrepancy between the prior expectation and the actual performance on the optimal strategies and profits are also discussed. Numerical analysis isconducted to further explore our findings. Results showed that the proportion of consumers who are sensitive to discrepancy and the level of discrepancy sensitivity has strong influence on firm＇s optimal strategies. When the ad cost is medium, the firm will choose a low ad intensity（i.e. the advertised quality is lower than the actual quality） if the proportion of consumers who are sensitive to discrepancy is large enough. Otherwise, it will choose a high ad intensity（i.e. the advertised quality is smaller than the true quality）. The higher the actual quality is, the more this firm is inclined to invest in the low ad intensity if the proportion of consumers who are sensitive to discrepancy is small enough. When the ad cost medium, the low ad intensity will be the firm＇s optimal strategy, and the ad intensity will increase with the level of discrepancy sensitivity. When the ad cost is not that high, the more sensitive to discrepancy consumers is, the more inclined the company is to invest in the highest ad intensity.