Powerful brand influentials: conceptualization, measurement, and distinctiveness of a brand’s influential consumers

2012-12-10This article focuses on a unique and important consumer construct, a brand’s influential consumers, namely “the powerful brand influential”. In the marketplace, influential consumers designate those who exert exceptional influence on other consumers’ decision making. Extant literature has established opinion leaders as influential consumers of a specific product category and market mavens as influential consumers of the general marketplace. Although the existence and power of a brand’s influential consumers are well-documented and the designations of these consumers are proliferated, we have limited understanding about these consumers. The conceptualization of a brand’s influential consumers, the distinctiveness of the construct from existing concepts, and the measurement for the construct are largely missing. ❧ Drawing from various domains of literature, this article provides a systematic conceptualization of a brand’s influential consumers that reflects four defining components. Corresponding to these conceptual properties, the powerful brand influential is defined as consumers (1) who are strongly attached to a given brand and (2) who have high tendency to influence other consumers’ brand decisions through (3) a high engagement of (4) passionate and emotionally evocative word-of-mouth about the brand. This article then details the differentiation of the new construct from six conceptually related constructs and posits a set of corresponding propositions. Study 1 develops a 6-item measurement, the Powerful Brand Influential Scale (PBIS), to represent each of the four conceptual properties. Study 2, 3, and 4 provide converging support that the powerful brand influential construct is theoretically and empirically distinguishable from the six constructs including market maven, opinion leader, brand attachment, brand ambassador, brand attitude strength, and brand satisfaction. Our proposition testing substantiates the distinctiveness and added value of the powerful brand influential construct – demonstrating that this new construct better predicts many key brand outcomes including brand word-of-mouth, intrinsic pleasure derived from brand word-of-mouth, brand advocacy behavior, tendency to influence others’ brand decision, brand loyal behavior, actual brand purchase as well as desirable emotional and word-of-mouth responses toward a positive brand event than the related constructs examined. Moreover, using different samples and brands from diverse product categories, the four studies establish the reliability, robustness, known group, convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity of the PBIS. The article concludes by discussing theoretical and managerial contribution, findings, and implications of the powerful brand influential construct and the PBIS along with limitations and areas of future research