Do Pepsi Drinkers Talk About Sleepwalker? The Effects of Self-Presentation and Conformity in Competing Word-of-Mouth

While advertisers increase spending on marketing campaigns, little is known about its effectiveness for the firm and for its competitors. In this study, we explore consumer responses to TV advertising of the 2010 Superbowl show. We investigate how peer exposure to brands affects word-of-mouth generation for the brand and its competitors using a unique datasets with 1.3 million users’ activities during 72 days in a social network site. We find that users with more friends on SNS have a higher tendency to generate WOM about TV commercials. Second, peer exposure of a brand has a negative relationship with users’ tendency to generate WOM about both the same brand and competing brands. Particularly, one additional friend’s mention would decrease WOM probability of the brand by 0.3% and that of its competitor by 0.1%. Our work provides novel insights on the diffusion of WOM and practical implications for social media marketing.