1. Introduction
The Internet dramatically facilitates consumer interconnections. Email
referrals, online forums of users and newsgroups, as well as
customer reviews encouraged by merchant websites allow consumers
to share information far more easily than ever before. This
interconnectivity is a global phenomenon that facilitates the dissemination
of both positive and negative word-of-mouth (Shankar,
Smith, & Rangaswamy, 2003), dissemination that cannot be easily
controlled by marketers or brand managers. In addition, it challenges
the existence of geographical markets, and hence the ability to
conduct local marketing strategies.
However, marketers have noted the customer-leveraging possibilities
the Internet offers (Brodin, 2000), among which viral marketing
is amongst the most intriguing. The goal of viral marketing is to use
consumer-to-consumer (or peer-to-peer) communications—as
opposed to company-to-consumer communications—to disseminate