Strong Ties VS Weak Ties in WOM Marketing
Strong and weak ties’ practical applications in real-world settings have been widely discussed. There are lots of theories related to the effectiveness of weak ties, especially in job-seeking settings. As a Communication major, I am personally interested in learning how advertising influences people’s minds and behaviors. Therefore, I found this paper on strong ties versus weak ties in word-of-mouth marketing, which offers me new insights into how knowledge of social networks, especially that of strong and weak ties, can be a helpful tool for the advertisement industry.
This article discusses a popular marketing strategy, word-of-mouth (WOM), and tries to offer evidence to prove strong ties are, in fact, more effective than weak ties in terms of word-of-mouth. Word-of-mouth refers to person-to-person, usually oral, communication regarding a product or service without being perceived as commercial. As mentioned above, the strength of weak ties theory has been believed to be effective in various settings, with job-seeking as the leading example, for their informative and structural advantages over strong ties. It is also commonly held that weak ties are better for marketing strategies such as word-of-mouth, as they can spread the word out faster and to a more extensive range.
The authors of the research papers provide a new perspective. They assert that the positions of strong and weak ties should be reconsidered in marketing, as the ultimate goal is to get the targeted audience to discuss and adopt a new product. After clarifying the purpose, the researchers suggest that strong ties are precious due to the nature of frequent interactions and strong interpersonal influences among deep relationships, which could be more effective in advertising novel products. Another reason why strong ties are more superior is because of their uniqueness in function. Since WOM campaigns are commonly combined with advertising or non-personal forms of marketing, their advantage in carrying information from one group to another and even disseminating it globally is overestimated. Advertising offers exactly the same function as weak ties in this case.
As they expand the argument in detail, triadic closure and bridges are also mentioned within the context. According to triadic closure, if two people have shared friends, they are more likely to become friends. For WOM marketing, if two people that have shared friends are both convinced by a product, the shared friends will be very likely to be influenced as well over time as he/she will hear about the product from multiple channels. The strong pressure from strong ties is, therefore, extremely effective. In terms of bridges, the most notable strength of weak ties, which is to transmit information through a weak tie between two groups, is being challenged. Other forms of advertising such as websites, television, and magazines can replace weak ties.
Therefore, the researchers prove their hypotheses that “strong ties have a greater aggregate impact than weak ties.” (Hu et al., 2018) This example makes me think a lot about alternatives that serve similar functions as weak ties in other settings. Nevertheless, strong ties are usually unreplaceable, and there can potentially be more applications and uses given their deep and tight characteristics.