Elsevier

Business Horizons

Volume 54, Issue 3, May–June 2011, Pages 219-229
Business Horizons

The new WTP: Willingness to participate

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bushor.2011.01.003Get rights and content

Abstract

A key concept underlying competitive strategy is that of WTP, representing the consumer's ‘willingness to pay’ a premium price for goods or services. Through branding and other efforts, companies strive to push their message out and create a high willingness to pay, whereby consumers feel there are few or no substitutes for what these companies are selling. Social media, however, are making push-based marketing anachronistic. Users of social media typically eschew professional communications forced on them by faceless and impersonal organizations, in favor of more personal conversations. These individuals seek greater engagement with their preferred brands, and involvement—with or without the company's approval—in creating brand personalities. Their affinity for these preferred brands might well auger the dawn of a new WTP: willingness to participate. This article presents a model of consumer engagement through social media, and argues for re-conceptualizing WTP by utilizing a series of examples which show how companies that engage consumers via social media (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) stand to reap the benefits of long-term competitive advantages.

Section snippets

Rethinking the role of social media

There is no doubt that social media (SM) is big, and getting bigger. Facebook, the world's largest social networking site, has over 500 million members—more ‘citizens’ than any country except China or India (Techxav, 2010)—and generates expected revenues of over $1 billion (Eldon, 2010). Facebook interactions account for 25% of all page views on the Internet, while Twitter and email account for 10% each; all other pages and applications, combined, account for the remainder (Blodget, 2009).

The origins of social media

Social media are Internet-based technologies that facilitate conversations (Carton, 2009). Their main embodiments are through the Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter websites/applications, as well as 200+ million blogs in existence (Pitt et al., in press). They differ from more traditional Web applications by offering users a platform for content creation, content upload, networking, conversing, media sharing, and bookmarking.

While studies examining various aspects of social media have proliferated

The ‘old’ WTP: Willingness to pay

Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door: this is the genesis of the notion of competitive advantage, according to Ghemawat and Rivkin (2010). Competitive advantage, they state, occurs in the difference between the cost a firm incurs to provide a good or service and the price a buyer is willing to pay. The scholars term this gap the competitive wedge. The greater the gap between cost and price, the greater the value captured by the firm. Competitive advantage, then,

Company and content

There are six distinct, interrelated components we believe operate to create and sustain consumer engagement. They begin with the company and the content it creates. While the Internet remains a ‘pull’ medium—that is, firms seek to pull viewers through content versus push content to viewers via more traditional media like print and television—it nonetheless must be seeded with some sort of content. In this case, content often takes the form of a Facebook product or brand page, a Twitter tweet,

The model in action: Case studies

The 6C model illustrates an escalation in consumer participation as a result of the use of social media channels—or, as we have dubbed it, the new WTP: willingness to participate. To test our model, we conducted a number of case studies, using mainly public and secondary sources, looking for evidence of (1) escalating participation on the part of consumers and (2) commensurate brand success. In this section, we report on four salient cases: Threadless, Need for Speed, Carlsberg, and M-PESA.

We

Lessons learned

Figure 5 summarizes our four case studies in terms of the 6C model of consumer engagement and its concomitant willingness to participate. Threadless’ use of its extensive community at each stage of the design, build, and deliver processes is far and away one of the most comprehensive examples we have seen of consumer engagement. Their customers are also their creative input, leaving the company in the enviable position of printing t-shirts (a low-cost activity) and managing the community

Conclusion and future research

Bampo, Ewing, Mather, Stewart, and Wallace (2008) showed that social networks have a fungible impact on form performance. Moreover, their study asserted that scale-free networks—those that had a great number of current and potential nodes with members sharing a preferential attachment—were the most successful. They may as well have been describing social media networks like the ones presented in this article. While there has been a great deal of interest in social media, very few studies have

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