One may immediately see the parallel between e-mavens and
market mavens, a notion introduced by Feick and Price (1987). Market
mavens are people who constantly acquire and spread general
marketplace information. E-mavens on the other hand are people
who acquire and spread information via electronic platforms such as
email (Phelps et al., 2004). In other words, market mavens are
defined by the type of information that is acquired and spread (i.e.,
marketplace information) while e-mavens are defined by the channel
(i.e., email and the Internet) through which information is acquired and spread. E-mavens are on the other hand, conceptually similar to
the notion of Internet mavens (Belch et al., 2005), except that we
include both email and the Internet. Although the market maven
construct has been shown to act as a personal trait (e.g., Laroche et al.,
2003), we define e-mavens here primarily by high frequency of
forwarding online content and leave the potential to explore e-mavens
as a personal trait for future research.