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This study aims to identify how the personal social capital of opinion leaders contributes to the market adoption of start-up innovations.

A design-oriented case study is undertaken with a start-up company focusing on the development and commercialization of innovations in the veterinary market. Based on a literature review, the authors examine the social capital in value creation and the role of opinion leaders and use qualitative methodology and semi-structured in-depth interviews to collect data.

The adoption of innovations could start with opinion leaders that will later share their experience with other members of the professional community. In turn, social capital allows for creating a collaboration between start-ups and leaders based on a number of specific parameters.

This paper contributes to marketing literature by providing new insights regarding collaboration between start-ups and opinion leaders. The collaboration between opinion leaders and start-ups could be implemented not only in the veterinary industry but also in other industries with minor adaptations. Authors demonstrate how the social capital of external stakeholders may be used as a resource of the company for business development. The main contribution of this study is to demonstrate that social capital could be used as a parameter for the adoption of innovations. The key parameters that allow creating cooperation between start-up and opinion leader have been identified.

The purpose of this paper is to present the first systematic approach toward brand development of the country of Slovenia. The approach was of a holistic nature as relevant areas (i.e. economy, tourism, culture, science, sport) and related key stakeholders that affect and co‐create the Slovenia brand had been determined in advance and invited to participate in building Slovenia's identity.

Specifically, the paper presents the results of creating the identity of the “I feel Slovenia” brand from the viewpoint of 30 Slovenian opinion leaders. The author invited experts to express their opinions through a Delphi method, which was repeated in two iterations. The results of both iterations are presented in the paper. Their opinions represented the first step of the process in developing identity elements of the Slovenia brand.

According to opinion leaders, the key idea of brand identity should be related to Slovenian nature, which should also be reasonably incorporated in other brand identity elements.

The development of brand identity with opinion leaders represents the first, but very important step towards a systematic process in developing the country brand of Slovenia.

The brand‐building process was executed on a real example of the country of Slovenia, which has never been a strong country brand. The paper could serve as a case study for other countries in central and eastern Europe, which have not worked seriously on their country brands until now.

Misinformation (i.e. information identified as false) spreads widely and quickly on social media – a space where crowds of ordinary citizens can become leading voices – during a crisis when information is in short supply. Using the theoretical lenses of socially curated flow and networked gatekeeping frameworks, we address the following three aims: First, we identify emergent opinion leaders in misinformation-related conversations on social media. Second, we explore distinct groups that contribute to online discourses about misinformation. Lastly, we investigate the actual dominance of misinformation within disparate groups in the early phases of mass shooting crises.

This paper used network and cluster analyses of Twitter data that focused on the four most prevalent misinformation themes surrounding the El Paso mass shooting.

A total of seven clusters of users emerged, which were classified into five categories: (1) boundary-spanning hubs, (2) broadly popular individuals, (3) reputation-building hubs, (4) locally popular individuals and (5) non-opinion leaders. Additionally, a content analysis of 128 tweets in six clusters, excluding the cluster of non-opinion leaders, further demonstrated that the opinion leaders heavily focused on reiterating and propagating misinformation (102 out of 128 tweets) and collectively made zero corrective tweets.

These findings expand the intellectual understanding of how various types of opinion leaders can shape the flow of (mis)information in a crisis. Importantly, this study provides new insights into the role of trans-boundary opinion leaders in creating an echo chamber of misinformation by serving as bridges between otherwise fragmented discourses.

The purpose of this paper is to determine hidden drivers of electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) by modeling attributes of self-relevant and quality-relevant values. This is a meaningful extension of previous consumer behavior research regarding the association of eWOM and self-constructs.

An on-site survey was conducted to collect data. Statistical analyses, including structural equation modeling and multigroup analysis, were used to empirically examine which factors significantly influence café customers to engage in eWOM.

The study found significant drivers of eWOM intentions by examining self-relevant values connected with the café, such as conveying reflected appraisal of self, conspicuous presentation and self-image congruity beyond the simple evaluation of service quality. The moderating effect of consumer opinion leadership on the relationships between those drivers and eWOM intentions was also investigated.

The results demonstrated that consumers’ self-construal value was a salient diver of eWOM intentions rather than service quality value itself. However, the findings showed that these service qualities positively influenced opinion leaders’ eWOM intentions to generate information. This makes an important contribution by providing practical messages for foodservice operators to develop more effective marketing strategies.

The present research extends our understanding of the drivers of eWOM beyond the idea that eWOM simply reflects perceived quality evaluations. The authors found that consumers can construct a self-identity and present themselves to others in the virtual world by showing “what they eat or experience”.

Building on social media and destination brand-related literature, this study aims to explore World Heritage Sites’ (WHSs) brand diffusion and formation process from long-term and short-term perspectives, which includes brand diffusion, user-generated content (UGC), opinion leaders and brand events’ impact.

This study uses a mixed-method including text mining, keyword analysis and social network analysis to explore the brand formation process of four popular WHSs in Beijing, namely, the Palace Museum, Great Wall, Summer Palace and Temple of Heaven and more than 10,000,000 users’ data on Sina Weibo has been implemented to uncover the underlying social media branding mechanism.

The results show that the number of postings keeps in a stable range in most months, but, in general, there are no common rules for changing trends among the four WHSs; long-term high-frequency keywords related to history and culture account for a higher percentage; different kinds of accounts have varying impacts on information diffusion, in which media accounts lead to a bigger influence. However, more followers do not necessarily mean more interactions and most of the interaction ratio is much lower than 0.01000; brand events facilitate brand dissemination and have an impact on the creation of UGC.

This study is valuable for destination marketers to deeper understand brand diffusion and formation and provides valuable insights for developing effective destination marketing strategies.

Unlike previous studies that only concern a few parts of destination brand formation via social media (e.g. brand diffusion, brand events or opinion leaders’ impact), this study takes a more comprehensive perspective by systematically analyzing the brand formation process of WHSs on social media. By considering both long-term diffusion and short-term representative events, this study provides a more holistic understanding of the branding mechanism.

Research conducted in the early 1990s in Hungary indicated a lack of knowledgeable and influential personal sources in the cosmetics product category. The purpose of this article is to examine women cosmetics opinion leaders in Hungary approximately ten years into the country’s transition to a market economy. Because of the evolution of the cosmetics market over the past decade and Hungarian women’s increased involvement with cosmetics, we expected to see the emergence of opinion leadership in the product category. Survey data from 340 Hungarian women indicate that the incidence of cosmetics opinion leadership and self‐reported product knowledge is lower than what we might expect in more established market economies. Nonetheless, we found the relationships between cosmetics opinion leadership in Hungary and antecedent and consequent variables are similar to what we would expect in more established market economies. We discuss the implications of these results for marketing managers.

This paper aims to look at a major pharmaceutical company that was expanding its research and decided that it needed to identify and collect information on “key opinion leaders” in research communities central to its new drug development activities.

The study shows that the company sought to harness the power of analytics technology to study peer relationships in research communities and keep this information continuously updated.

The study finds that executives identified several key opinion leader candidates, and also developed an appreciation for the pattern of competitor activity across the research community.

The executives continually challenged the analysts, kept the overall process focused on the key business drivers, and successfully blended their understanding of the kinds of insights the company required with the analysts' ability to generate insights from large volumes of data.

Where traditional corporate approaches provided reliable intelligence on tens or possibly hundreds of key participants in fields the company was familiar with, the decision analytic solution allowed the company to explore and regularly update tens of thousands of relationships across previously unknown fields.

The purpose of this paper is to identify mechanisms and strategies involved in individual and local responses to complex global sustainability issues such as climate change.

This paper describes an innovative approach to understanding the role of informal leadership and its utility in influencing societal attitudes and practice. The approach builds on theories of diffusion in which learning about new ideas, practices or technologies occurs through interpersonal communication with informal opinion leaders. It draws on findings from studies in other fields of social research, such as community health, development aid, and agriculture, in which the engagement of opinion leaders has been found to speed up the spread of responsive behaviours. The approach also analyses linkages between the concepts of response capacity to climate change and social capital with the strategies of opinion leaders for influencing societal change through informal social networks.

Research related to social change in response to climate change has focused predominantly on the need for reform at the public policy and institutional level, and at the other extreme, on individual behaviour change. The role of leaders has been cited as an important component of social change in case studies of adaptive management of natural resources, sustainability studies, and in research on social capital.

Development of the approach will contribute to the understanding of social mechanisms and processes involved in community engagement with complex problems and more specifically, response capacity for climate change at the regional level.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the physicians’ attitude toward branded generic drugs in prescribing those drugs in some selective medical conditions and to identify the factors that influence physicians’ behavior toward prescribing branded generic drugs in the said selective medical conditions.

The study was carried out across six major cities in eastern India with 301 physicians. The current study introduced some significant elements into the modified technology acceptance model (TAM) with title the extended tam for product usage (TETPU) to analyze the prescribing factors that influence physicians in five common yet serious medical conditions in India. Out of nine factors considered here, seven were selected from the previous literature studies of different product segments and two were proposed by the authors. Demographic factor was proposed as the confounding variable.

The results indicated that apart from the factors “perceived no need” and “physicians’ perception and need achievement” rest of the factors showed satisfactory to excellent results.

The current study findings may enable the pharmaceutical managers to revise or modify their current marketing communication and other brand-building strategies so as to achieve a superior performance that offers them a competitive advantage.

The paper fulfils a need for advancing the knowledge on the physician’s prescription influencing factors by introducing the newer aspects of the concept and offers a theoretical framework for the academia and practical framework for the managers who desire to implement the strategies to achieve competitive advantage.