Journal of Marketing Research and Case Studies 12 from 153 to 327. Although WOM is positive in this setup due to high product characteristics, the number of buyers stops increasing after a short period of time as in other experiments (Fig.2-d). In the first time step, an individual is inBluenced by 75 other individuals. In the second time step, this figure signiBicantly increases to 85, explaining that positive WOM induced many other individuals to purchase the product. At the 8th time step, this Bigure reaches 91 and stays constant afterwards. This can be explained by the fact that, while for most of the consumers, an individual is connected to purchase the product in the first time steps, there may not be enough people left in the consumer’s network to purchase the current product and make a positive WOM to trigger other individuals purchasing decisions. In Exp.5, the company sets its marketing strategy, to reach higher number of opinion leaders. The initial number of buyers increases 228 compared to benchmark and reaches 275 at the end of the scenario (Fig.2- e). The profit of the company decreases from 152 to 90, indicating that when a product does not satisfy consumer preferences, targeting at opinion leaders do not result in significant increase in the number of buyers. In this setup an individual is influenced by 45 other individuals on the average, and only 8 of the 45 are opinion leaders. This indicates that although the company targets increased number of opinion leaders to collaborate with, it fails to convince people to purchase the product when individuals think the product characteristics are below their expectations. The consumers purchasing decisions are not triggered by opinion leaders and the extra cost associated with each opinion leader may cause a decrease in company’s profit. In Exp.6 a decreasing price strategy is governed. The company decreased the price of the product by 2% at each time step. The number of buyers in the first time step is not different compared to the benchmark experiment. The number of buyers is initially around 216 (Fig.2-f). Falling prices triggers the buying motivation of new individuals. In this setup, the number of consumers that purchased the product increases steadily until the end of the time horizon and reaches 280. Profit of the company (162), is slightly higher than the benchmark experiment. Although the number of buyers is increased, due to the falling prices the profit of the company does not increase dramatically. Finally, the increasing promotion strategy is tested in Exp.7. The promotion intensity is increased by 2% at each time step. As with the decreasing price strategy, increasing promotion strategy triggers new individuals purchasing decision and the number of buyers keeps increasing until the last time step (Fig.2-g). This strategy, compared to the benchmark experiment, leads to significant increases in both the number of buyers and profit. Although the associated promotion cost is lower compared to Exp3, in which the promotion intensity is set high and kept constant for all 20 time steps, the proBit of the company in this scenario is lower.