Dynamic Effects of Social Influence and Direct Marketing on the Adoption of High-Technology Products

Many firms capitalize on their customers’ social networks to improve the success rate of their new products. In this article, the authors analyze the dynamic effects of social influence and direct marketing on the adoption of a new high-technology product. Social influence is likely to play a role because the decision to adopt a high-involvement product requires extensive information gathering from various sources. The authors use call detail records to construct ego networks for a large sample of customers of a Dutch mobile telecommunications operator. Using a fractional polynomial hazard approach to model adoption timing and multiple social influence variables, they provide a fine-grained analysis of social influence. They show that the effect of social influence from cumulative adoptions in a customer's network decreases from the product introduction onward, whereas the influence of recent adoptions remains constant. The effect of direct marketing is also positive and decreases from the product introduction onward. This study provides new insights into the adoption of high-technology products by analyzing dynamic effects of social influence and direct marketing simultaneously.