Abstract
Prior research on consumers’ web searches primarily examined the effect of web searches on product sales or the characteristics of the web searchers. Differing from prior research, we investigate the effect of marketing activities on web search volume. We selected 314 movies released in China whose box office revenues were greater than RMB 10,000. Then, we collected data points on web search volume and marketing activities from the Baidu, Sina Weibo, and Douban platforms from the 3 weeks prior to the release of each movie. Marketing activity data points were derived from three sources: news media, social network marketing, and film stars. Our data analysis of 6594 observations revealed two major findings. First, news media, social network marketing, and the effect of film stars increased the web search volumes of the films. In particular, social network marketing had the strongest impact on the web search volume. Second, the previous-day web search volume increased the present-day web search volume without marketing activities, suggesting a spillover effect. We discuss the academic contributions and managerial implications of our findings in the context of online marketing and new product launches.
Highlights
A search engine is an effective online marketing instrument for new products, such as newly released movies [1]
This study aims to close this gap by empirically examining whether the web search volume is determined by three popular marketing activities: news media, social network marketing, and film stars [4,5]
While performance-based star power (PSP) had no impact, non-performance-based star power (NSP) increased the web search volume (p-value = 0.83 and p-value = 0.011 for performancebased star power (PSP) and NSP, respectively). These results imply that news media, social network marketing, and star power, nonperformance-based star power, could play a significant role in the web volume generation process
Summary
A search engine is an effective online marketing instrument for new products, such as newly released movies [1]. When a movie is newly released, for instance, consumers often use search engines to obtain information on its quality. Marketers should understand how to entice consumers to effectively use search engines, how the consumers’ web search volume is influenced by other large-budget marketing activities. During this past decade, researchers have paid much attention to consumers’ web searches. A vast amount of research investigates the impact of web searches on sales or the characteristics of web searchers, little is known about whether marketing activities influence consumers’ web searching [5]
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