Customers' Influence Makes or Breaks Your Brand's Success Story - Accounting for Positive and Negative Social Influence in Online Customer Networks

The ongoing proliferation of digital technologies is reshaping the customer-firm relationship by providing new possibilities for companies and customers to interact with each other. Companies try to involve customers in firm-sponsored online customer networks to connect them more deeply with the brand. In this context, the impact of positive social influence induced among customers on their value contribution has been acknowledged, however, research often neglects the impact of negative social influence. We propose therefore a novel approach to account for direct and indirect as well as positive and negative social influence between customers in online customer networks to calculate customers’ integrated value contribution. We demonstrate the applicability of our approach using an illustrative online customer network. Our approach allows practitioners to evaluate customers’ “true” value in online customer networks by preventing overand underestimation of customers’ value contribution.