Study Of Word Of Mouth Effects On The Chinese Mainland Movie Market

As China’s economy developing into the stage of restructuring, transformation and upgrading, the cultural industry has become an important pillar of the national economy. The film industry, as one of the main categories of cultural industries, has become more and more prominent in the national economy. As typical experience cultural goods, word of mouth information about films has always been the important factor affecting consumer demands and box-office revenues, and popularity of the Internet makes this effect become more extensive and in-depth. Under this macroeconomic situation and industry background, the research about word of mouth effects on film market has important significance for promoting the development of the film market and guiding the practical work of word of mouth marketing.Study about word of mouth effects of the domestic film market is rather rare, with neither systematic combing of theories nor empirical analysis to explore the law. By using methods like literature analysis, case notes and empirical research and on the basis of combing relevant concepts and theories, this paper starts from the characteristics of movies, describes the applicability of word of mouth marketing for film industry, explains the process of word of mouth affecting demands of watching movies combined SOR theory and cost-benefit analysis, and meanwhile describes the bidirectional affect relationship between the word of mouth and the box office from a dynamic perspective. Further, the paper sets a static panel regression model and a total regression model separately from perspectives of process and total amount, explores the specific relationship between word of mouth and box office using related film data of year 2012. Finally, the article presents recommendations to improve word of mouth marketing of the mainland film market from three aspects of producer, government and intermediary.The main conclusions of this paper are:(1) because of characteristics such as artistic and aesthetic, experience with entertainment, culture and trends, the movie is highly influenced by word of mouth and word of mouth marketing is very suitable for movie’s spread; (2) throughout the dissemination of word of mouth information, there are a lot of factors effecting communicators, information evaluation and treatment, and recipients, the word of mouth information affects demand and box office, while the box office will have an impact on word of mouth information; (3) The empirical analysis indicates that within the process of film release, word of mouth dynamically impacts weekly box office revenue, while the budgets, sources, genres information are indirect factors affecting word of mouth. From the total amount, both the valence and the volume of word of mouth have significant positive correlations with box office, there is a rough "anti-S-type" relationship between the valence of word of mouth and the total box office, which is a clear evidence of increasing returns.