In Hollywood, the buzz for a new film is usually considered a good predictor of its success at the box office.

But Prof. Thorsten Hennig-Thurau from the MCM's Chair of Marketing & Media along with a team of marketing scholars from Toulouse and Karlsruhe now provide empirical evidence that buzz is actually so much more than just an indicator -- it's also infectious. The authors show that the buzz for a new product causes success by:

1. Making more people aware of the upcoming product; plus
2. Raising people's quality expectations ("This must be great when there is so much buzz!"); plus
3. Sparking curiosity in people ("What's the buzz?!"); plus
4. Making people want to join the societal "Buzz Train" -- or do YOU want to miss out the latest cultural phenomenon? Take the example of the actress Margot Robbie, who reported that she heard some men talking about her Barbie ® movie: “One guy was like, ‘Dude, it is a cultural moment, don’t you want to be a part of culture?’ And the other guy was like, ‘I’ll never see it,’ and by the end he did want to see it.

With five pretty extensive studies, the authors provide evidence for these effects to be causal in a new article accepted for publication in Journal of Product Innovation Management (JPIM), the world's leading scholarly innovation management journal.

Prof. Hennig-Thurau and his co-authors  Prof. Timo Mandler (Toulouse Business School), Prof. Ann-Kristin Kupfer (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology), and former MCM scholars Dr. Ricarda Schauerte (now at ClayTech) and Dr. Gerrit Cziehso (now at Aldi) also quantify the size of these causal mechanisms on movie success through an extensive set of ambitious simulations. They  control for a large array of other factors that they rule out to bias the results.

The results should be of value for anyone in the business of marketing new products, particularly those which are of a hedonic nature such as movies and video games. The new research made in Münster shows that successfully stimulating buzz pays off twice -- by making those who 'feel the buzz' prospect shoppers, but also by reaching further customers through the contagious power of buzz.

Read the article here -- it's open access!