WTP جدید : تمایل به مشارکت

A key concept underlying competitive strategy is that of WTP, representing the consumer's ‘willingness to pay’ a premium price for goods or services. Through branding and other efforts, companies strive to push their message out and create a high willingness to pay, whereby consumers feel there are few or no substitutes for what these companies are selling. Social media, however, are making push-based marketing anachronistic. Users of social media typically eschew professional communications forced on them by faceless and impersonal organizations, in favor of more personal conversations. These individuals seek greater engagement with their preferred brands, and involvement—with or without the company's approval—in creating brand personalities. Their affinity for these preferred brands might well auger the dawn of a new WTP: willingness to participate. This article presents a model of consumer engagement through social media, and argues for re-conceptualizing WTP by utilizing a series of examples which show how companies that engage consumers via social media (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) stand to reap the benefits of long-term competitive advantages.

Bampo, Ewing, Mather, Stewart, and Wallace (2008) showed that social networks have a fungible impact on form performance. Moreover, their study asserted that scale-free networks—those that had a great number of current and potential nodes with members sharing a preferential attachment—were the most successful. They may as well have been describing social media networks like the ones presented in this article. While there has been a great deal of interest in social media, very few studies have tried to parse their components, understand their inner workings, and analyze the effects they can have on firms’ strategies. Our article represents an initial attempt. The case studies we cite support our model of consumer engagement. More importantly, they suggest to us that companies need to focus more on increasing participation through social media, and less on pricing. In other words, a willingness to participate leads to greater results when social media is employed, than does willingness to pay. This is because engaged consumers are willing to give much more than money. They are willing to give the most valuable commodity of all: time. In doing so, they take actions that extend and leverage companies’ efforts. For companies, these benefits are substantial, but come at the price of ceding control over the brand once content has been posted to social media channels. Of course, this study is not without its flaws. A more rigorous test of the model is required to see if these preliminary results are supported. Studies quantifying more precisely the effect of increased willingness to participate are also needed, in order to determine the extent and strength of this effect. Finally, there might be additional constraints, boundaries, or even new elements that our limited exploration has not considered. Future studies might look at establishing a more comprehensive model and its boundary conditions. One thing we do know for sure: social media are here to stay. Those organizations that have pioneered their use have reaped early-adopter benefits. They have also shown us the amazing potential that these technologies hold, and the transformative power they can have on marketing. As David Meerman Scott (2010, p. 231) succinctly puts it, now is the time for marketers to “think a bit more like a publisher and less like a marketing and PR person.”