A large number of visualization tools have been created to help decision makers understand increasingly rich databases of product, customer, sales force, and other types of marketing information. This article presents a framework for thinking about how visual representations are likely to affect the decision processes or tasks that marketing managers and consumers commonly face, particularly those that involve the analysis or synthesis of substantial amounts of data. From this framework, the authors derive a set of testable propositions that serve as an agenda for further research. Although visual representations are likely to improve marketing manager efficiency, offer new insights, and increase customer satisfaction and loyalty, they may also bias decisions by focusing attention on a limited set of alternatives, increasing the salience and evaluability of less diagnostic information, and encouraging inaccurate comparisons. Given this, marketing managers are advised to subject insights from visual representations to more formal analysis.

Given influencers’ greater social influence, managers are often advised to target influencers alone in social media marketing. However, the spread of word-of-mouth (WOM) may be enhanced by social affirmation (i.e., cues a message is valuable to others). The authors show that an influencer + follower seeding strategy, in which the best influencer-follower pair in a social network is chosen to tweet and retweet a message, respectively, outperforms an influencer-only strategy in spreading word-of-mouth. Lab experiments show that the likelihood that a user chooses to share or engage with a promoted tweet is higher under an influencer + follower strategy than under an influencer-only or influencer-twice strategy. Greater perceived message value to others explains these results. A field study involving promoted tweets shows that an influencer + follower strategy leads to greater event attendance than a two-influencer strategy. Simulation results show that the advantages of influencer + follower seeding strategies over influencer-only strategies are greater for social networks characterized by a stronger response to social affirmation. When social affirmation is not important to WOM diffusion, an influencer-only seeding strategy is superior. These findings contribute to research on seeding strategies and provide firms a way to improve return on investments in influencer marketing.

By lowering the costs of gathering and sharing information and offering new ways to learn about products before purchase, the Internet reduces traditional distinctions between search and experience goods. At the same time, differences in the type of information sought for search and experience goods can precipitate differences in the process through which consumers gather information and make decisions online. A preliminary experiment shows that though there are significant differences in consumers’ perceived ability to evaluate product quality before purchase between search and experience goods in traditional retail environments, these differences are blurred in online environments. An analysis of the online behavior of a representative sample of U.S. consumers shows that consumers spend similar amounts of time online gathering information for both search and experience goods, but there are important differences in the browsing and purchase behavior of consumers for these two types of goods. In particular, experience goods involve greater depth (time per page) and lower breadth (total number of pages) of search than search goods. In addition, free riding (purchasing from a retailer other than the primary source of product information) is less frequent for experience than for search goods. Finally, the presence of product reviews from other consumers and multimedia that enable consumers to interact with products before purchase has a greater effect on consumer search and purchase behavior for experience than for search goods.