About the Book

The interpersonal communication has received great attention in social psychology. The consumer influence through word-of-mouth communication is further accelerated with the advent of the Internet (Cheung and Thadani, 2010). Internet technology has brought lot of changes in tools, techniques and methods of marketing. It provides a new opportunity for consumers to share their product evaluations online via virtual opinion platform, discussion forum and blogs. Viral marketing has become a hot topic and an exciting area for research due to its relative novelty and explosive growth.

The technology has enhanced the capacity of the consumers to interact or communicate with even those community members who are unknown to each other. In March 2017, more than three billion people had access to the World Wide Web around the globe. Specifically in India, percentage of internet users is around 24.7% which is second highest of Asia's total percentage of internet users (www.internetworldstats.com). Just as the Internet creates many exciting new opportunities for consumers, it also introduces many new questions regarding the working and effectiveness of Viral Marketing that warrant careful study.

The review of past studies reveals that plethora of research has been carried out in the field of viral marketing or electronic word-of-mouth communication. However, one can still notice the research gaps in the existing literature which require further investigation.

This book is based on a study, the major objective of which is to identify the antecedents that may induce the consumers to engage in viral marketing or electronic word-of-mouth communication and also to determine the consequences of this communication on consumers‟ product purchase intentions and their intentions to spread further the information to others by using different electronic platforms. To accomplish this major objective the following specific topics are covered:

i) Developing and validating a scale which assesses the perceptions of the respondents towards Viral Marketing.

ii) Mapping the profile of the respondents on the basis of their psychographic, demographic and geographic Variables vis-à-vis their perceptions towards Viral Marketing.

iii) Determining the various antecedents which motivate the respondents (senders) for engaging in electronic word-of-mouth communication.

iv) Developing and validating a scale which determines the motives of seeking product related opinions of other consumers through virtual opinion platforms and hence modelling the consequential effects of this information on product purchase intentions and intentions to spread word-of-mouth.

v) Investigating the consumer preference structure which may reflect the relative importance assigned to each attribute contained in consumer-opinion platform as well as the importance of different features associated with these attributes.

vi) Identifying the factors which may influence the opening and forwarding of commercial emails received direct from the companies which initiate the recipients to further promote the products by sharing these emails with others.

vii) Identifying the factors behind the virality of advertising content.