Lifestyle Segmentation of e‐Mavens

Abstract

In this era of digitization, viral marketing may take advantage of e‐Mavenism i.e. high network value of customers, to inexpensively promote a product on various social networking sites. Previous researches examined specific psychological parameters of customers to identify seeds (customers with stronger network influence) through viral interactions across social networks. Though these studies provide evidence of successful identification of e‐mavens but lacks mention on its direct applicability in online marketing context. The present research proposed to model the e-mavenism behaviour using lifestyle constructs by demonstrating relationship between lifestyle constructs and individual's online content forwarding behavior. As per our results, self-expression construct, a primary motivation under Value of lifestyle (VALS) framework, was found to be a significant predictor of online content forwarding behaviour. Further, a model for identifying e‐mavens based on lifestyle characteristic with the help of collaborative filtering model using social-bookmarking sites is presented.