Quantitative Study Of Customer Value In New Product Diffusion In The Context Of Social Commerce

Social commerce is a more social, innovative and collaborative way of doing business. It has transformed e-commerce into a more socially-centered and user-driven environment. More than ever before, consumers are at the center of social commerce business models. Consumers participate in each stage of the product life cycle, and have a direct or indirect influence in each stage. While increasing competition in the market today, the new product emerged in endlessly, and in this context of social commerce, customers can obtain product information from multi-level and multi-channel, and customers no longer just rely on product information provided by merchants. Customers received more social influence when made purchase decisions, so in the entire life cycle of new products, the company not only can get immediate sales profit derived from each customer, but also include the influence value arising from customer’ purchase decisions on other potential customers.Based on the above background, this paper aims to measure customer value in new product diffusion in the context of social commerce, to use quantitative methods display intuitively customer value.Based on the analysising of social commerce theory and customer value theory to analysis the customer role in context of social commerce and the component of customer value, we proposed customer value measurement model under the context of social e-commerce, that is customer value include purchase value and influence value. Combination of Bass Model and Van den Bulte and Joshi’s Asymmetric Influence Model, we divided potential customers into two types:Influentials(TY-IN) and Imitators (TY-IM). According to the different type of influence and influencer and buy time, we divided diffusion influencing process into three kinds of different models, then measured influence range of three kinds of different models. Then, measured the purchase value,influence value and customer value of two type customers via the parameter δ. And simulated the relationship between instantaneous adoption rate (fi(t))the cumulative adoption rate(Fi(t))of different type of customers and parameters (pi, q1,P2, q2, qc) through MATLAB7.0 to determine the suitable parameters. And then simulated the relationship between instantaneous adoption rate, the cumulative adoption rate, purchase value, influence value and customer value of different types of customers and buy time, to analysis change process of different types of customer value. Last, the enterprises can obtain some recommendations about customer relationship mangmnet from simulation results.