Conclusions and Future Prospects Van Den Bulte Wuyts

Summary observations  Pattern of ties among people and among organizations matter.  General themes:  Closure on one hand hurts one’s ability to find novel information but on the other hand helps to secure cooperation and access to the information and other resources one has located.  Strong ties  help in mobilizing sources of support. Weak ties  valuable only for information search.  Network structure can have important effects on the spread of information.  Network structure has consequences for many fundamental issues in human or business behavior such as conflict and coordination, power, influence, change and innovation.

Summary observations  There exists a gap between what marketers should know and current stock of knowledge on social networks.  We know little about how social network structure relates to the emergence and reproduction of communities of customers sharing strong brand beliefs and attitudes.  We don’t know how it affects brand dynamics.  Sharing knowledge has been studied but in terms of technical knowledge, not market knowledge and a market orientation throughout organization.  Industrial buying: Relation between one’s position in the decision-making unit and one’s influence.  How and why organizational networks form and evolve over time?

Substantive problems and challenges  Word of Marketing  Theoretical and empirical regularities  Effectiveness of wom, similar viral campaigns  Scalability  Organizational Buying Behavior  Well-established studies  Changes in last 20 years  Gaining and Sharing Market Information  How marketing function is networked both externally with customers and internally with other functions, to optimally gather process and disseminate market information.  Why some managers perform better than others?

Substantive problems and challenges  Brands and Brand communities  How brand identities come to exist and evolve through social practices.  How brand cultures engage or disengage from general culture.  Rather than asking what networks can do for brand communities, marketers should also ask what their brand communities can do for their customers’ networks.  Marketing channels  Natural fit for social network analysis.  Can be used to investigate brokerage, competition and coordination  Collect data on actual distribution systems and study structure of ties. Are there some types of positions that keep occurring, if so, with what frequency.

Substantive problems and challenges  New product development  Challenge: generating customer-relevant innovations. Approaches: involving consultants or product development firms.  What kinds of positions in what kinds of networks with what kind of external partners are most beneficial to access external knowledge for superior new product development.  Resource-based view of the firm  What is the role of inter-organization in how firms sustain competitive advantage.  To make network theory more valuable, the structural approach have to be complemented with a better understanding of what actually happens within the ties.

Getting good data  Data Accuracy and Measurement  We need information on discrete entities and social connections. Some are easy to observe some are not so.  We need better measurement instruments.  Cost  Collecting data is expensive so researchers tried:  Piggy back on existing data.  Using physical proximity as a proxy for social proximity and social influence.  Use experiments instead of field data.

Analytical Tools  Increasing the level of expertise among market researchers  Social network analysis  Networks and game theory  Bring together network analysis and game theory  Network change and evolution  Challenges: Data, proper statistical models, mutual dependency between network structure and actor’s behavior.