Research On The Influences Of The Initial Seed Consumers On Innovation Diffusion Based On Complex Social Network

Along with the rapid development of the internet technology and a variety of means of communication, the society has entered into a complex network era, which has greatly changed our work and lifestyle, and makes companies have to consider the impact of the characteristics of the social network in the production and business operation activities. In the era of network, "A single spark can start a prairie fire", even the individual consumer would has a great impact on the sales of enterprise products. In this context, these small initial product consumers obtained by the means such as sampling strategy in the initial stage of diffusion are likely to be amplified in the social network, and then make the product occupies the dominant position of the market. Therefore, studying the network features of the initial seed consumers of innovation in the social network has positive significance to promote the diffusion of new products.This paper studies the influence of the initial seed consumers and its network distribution modes on innovation diffusion by using the method of simulation. The initial seed consumers consist of opinion leaders and ordinary consumers; the distribution of the initial seed consumers in social network has been divided into two different patterns:Centralized and decentralized. In the whole process of simulation, the opinion leaders are expressed as the top 2% high degree nodes called Hub nodes, others is ordinary consumers; the centralized distribution pattern is expressed as one node directly connects with at least one other nodes in the selected several seed nodes; the decentralized distribution pattern expresses different, in this pattern, the seed nodes are selected from the top 2% of the network nodes, and they can not directly connect with each other.In this paper, by using MATLAB simulation software, we analyzes the effect of the network distribution characteristics of initial seed consumers and its combination mode on innovation diffusion in the small world network and scale-free network respectively. The main content of this work include:1) The initial consumers increase to a certain extent an promote the innovation diffusion; the existent of Hub consumers can promote the innovation diffusion.2)The results of the influence of the initial consumer ratio and its network distribution mode and clustering effect on innovation diffusion simulated in the small world network shows that when the initial consumers expressed into centralized distribution pattern, it is better for promoting innovation product diffusion.3)The simulation in the scale-free network has showed that even there are a few of opinion leaders, the influence of the centralized distribution pattern on diffusion efficiency also showed great advantages. Last, this paper also discusses and analyzes the corresponding marketing strategy of innovation product diffusion based on the simulation results.