Can We Talk? The Impact of Willingness to Recommend on New-to-Market Service Brand Extension Within a Social Network

Co-authored by Ipsos Loyalty's Alexander Buoye, Vice President of Analytics, and Timothy Keiningham, Global Chief Strategy Officer & Executive Vice President, this paper provides a longitudinal examination of the relationship between recommend intention and the adoption of a new-to-market service (NTMS) brand extension. Analysis is conducted using anonymized data provided by a large U.S. telecommunications provider for 791 customers and their corresponding telephone network (11,552 individuals). The findings indicate an interaction effect where recommend intention predicts new service adoption only when the recommending customers are more recent adopters of the service and are in more frequent contact with the potential customer. Therefore, when managers are using the recommend intention metric to predict adoption, there is a need to take into consideration the exposure of the individual to others in their network and the timing of their adoption.

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