1. Membership: you belong or you don't. Some ppl may feel like they belong more than others
2. strength of social ties: closeness of group
                  -Primary: Frequent interaction, strong ties, large influence (family and friends)
                  -secondary: professional and neighborhood assoications, weak ties
3. Type of contact: direct (face to face) or indirect (indirect) interaction
4.Attraction: desirability that memebership in a given group has

      - Dissocative refrence group: negative desireablility (like DG or theta)

      - Aspiration- refrence group: non-membership groups with positive attraction (ASA)

• distinictve subgroup of society that self-selects on the basis of shared commitment to a product
• have a hierachrial social structure, set of shared beliefs, unique jargon and rituals

• word of mouth
• people sharing infor with other individuals in verbal

Advertising:

• can stimulate WOM by encouraging owners to talk about the brand or prospective owners to ask current owners about impression

• simulating opinion leadersing is to have a known opinion leader endorse a brand.

Product Sampling

-giving products to potential users

Retailing and Personal Selling

- encourage customer to pass information along to potential new customers for rewards in referal program

Creating Buzz

- the exponential expansion of WOM

-create buzz by providing opinion leaders advance info and product samples, having celebs use product, placing product in movies, sponsoring events, restricting supply, etc

-key aspect of guerrilla marketing: making intesnse connections with people and speeding up the natrual WOM process

non-geographically bound community, based on a sturctured set of social reslationships among owners of a brand and the psychological relationship they have with the brand its self.
       -adds value to product and builds intense loyalty
       -most relevant for high involvement, activity based products, with a high degree of uniqueness to the brand itself

      - To foster a brand community a company must est. a relationship w/ owner and help owners est. relationships w/each other

       -Brand Fests- gatherings of owners and others for the purpose of interacting with one another in the context of learning and using the brand

community that interacts over time around a topic of interest on the internet with a unqiue group structure and vocab.

Guiding Principles

1.Be Transparent: ID yourself as a company

2. Be part of the community

3. Adapt marketing efforts to fit nature of site: more commerical for commercial site, or more comunity for community sites

4. Take advantage of unique capabilities of each venue

1. Personal Sales

2. Advertising strategies

- Asch phenomenon:confroming with the majority

- people are brought together for sales presentation, salesman looks for one who shows approval, ask their opinion, goes down line from most to least approval so they get approval from mostly everyone

- show products are good for groups

Use:

1. Informational Influence: doctor come talk

2. Normative group influence: peer pressure (people will like you more if you drink this coffee)

3. ID Influence- product is consistent with groupls views and will be with your views too.

1. directily

- one seeks info from other

- when one person volunteers info

2. Indirectily

- obersvation as a by-product of normal group interaction

**high involvement pruchase situation: purchaser has limited product knowledge about an important decision and asks someone else

Reference Group Influence

1. Informational

2. Normatives

3. ID

person uses views of reference group members as potentially useful bits of info

Example: Runners eat X-nutrition bar, so it must be good

occurs when a person fulfills group expectations to gain a direct reward or to avoid a sanction

ex: buy certain alch to impress sum1

1. Group influence is strongest when product or brand is visible to group

2. Group influence is higher then less of necessity an item is

3. More commitment an indvidual feels to the group, the more the individual will confrom to group norms

4. the more relevant an activity is to the groups functioning, the stronger the pressure to confrom to group norms concering that activity

5. Individuals confidence in purchase situation