In the summer of 2001, the toymaker Hasbro launched a new handheld videogame called P-O-X. In the game, warriors fought invisible “alien infectors” that had escaped from a laboratory. A radio transmitter allowed kids to “battle” each other from up to 30 feet away.
Dina Mayzlin, an associate professor of marketing at Yale SOM, recently published research, with Harvard’s David Godes, aimed at getting direct evidence of the effect word-of-mouth marketing can have on sales. They also wanted to see if, and under what circumstances, opinion leaders are in fact better than others at propelling sales.
[This article has been reproduced with permission from Qn, a publication of the Yale School of Management http://qn.som.yale.edu]