Network Based Marketing Concepts And The Power Within Social Networks

Copyright 2008 © Ricardo Vasques

http://www.RicoSuccess.com

Hello,

I came from a traditional group of marketing professionals. During all of my professional life I’ve been taught and also experienced marketing segmentation based on geographical, demographical, psycographical and behavioral variables. But science and research have gone far ahead from this regular and universal knowledge and are proposing new approaches to identify and organize different consumer groups using more sophisticated concepts and techniques.

The rise of the “genetics era” has allowed a much deeper and profound knowledge of some characteristics of the individuals never before even imagined.

Nestle the famous Switzerland company, for instance, is researching the relationship between genes and flavor perception, leading to a new and revolutionary consumer’s categorization method that relies not only on age, behavior or other known segmentation variables, but also by the probability of reaction to certain flavors and aromas presented by some consumer groups.

This is only the beginning and the scratch of a world of distinguished and new possibilities, and also of a major issue that will consume years of debate: the DNA analyses confidentiality. But businesses like insurance, medicine, agriculture and others areas are eager to appy this kowledge to boost their results.

While the biotechnology development and ethical questions are being examined, other theories and concepts about consumer behavior are calling our attention.

The one we are going to discuss during the next posts is not really a “novelty”, but only in recent years has been treated and examined scientifically: Network Based Marketing.

Network based marketing concepts are old friends of mine. For more than fourteen years I’ve been practicing the majority of what you will read in this and future posts, but with no scientifical base or proof, only relying on common sense and non systematic personal social behavior observation.

On the next posts the “Small World”, “Six Degrees”, “Blau’s Space”, “Homophily” theories and the key aspects of the paper “Network-Based Marketing: Identifying Likely Adopters via Consumer Networks” wrote by Shawndra Hill, Foster Provost and Chris Volinsky, published by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in the Statistical Science magazine in 2006 are going to be explored to explain what is the power that lays beneath the Network Based Marketing concepts that can contribute for the sales performance improvement of many different businesses.

Ricardo Vasques
www.RicoSuccess.com

Until Then
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