The power that friendships have over emotions, values, and actions can transform relationships into effective marketing tools. Networks of friends can efficiently disseminate information and convince individuals to support initiatives. Previously studied by Yale School of Management associate professor Vineet Kumar and co-authors David Krackhardt and Scott Feld, the friendship paradox is a mathematical principle indicating that an individual’s friends have more friends than the individual. Currently, Yale researchers are exploring the extent to which the friendship paradox can be applied to marketing strategies.
Kumar and K. Sudhir, a professor from the Yale School of Management, recently published their findings indicating that friends can be used more effectively than randomly selected representatives (thirteen to thirty percent more effective) or paid influencers (five to eleven percent more effective) to convince individuals to adopt practices. The study was conducted using a data set from forty-three villages in India to assess whether the friendship paradox can be applied to word-of-mouth marketing.
The study could optimize marketing campaigns by utilizing pre-existing networks of friends, rather than attempting to identify and understand related networks. “[T]he main motivation for using the friendship paradox for word-of-mouth [marketing] is that we don’t need to know the relevant network structure,” Kumar said.
According to the paper, friends of friends can be used as seeds, or people who are selected to spread information. “Network information is very hard to come by. The great thing about this tool is we have a simple methodology where I say give me a list of your friends, and then we can use it to build a campaign. It’s a data-light method that is very practically useful,” Sudhir said. This finding could reduce the costs associated with researching how to target individuals in marketing campaigns.
While influencers are often selected as representatives for marketing campaigns due to their large following, the researchers found a negative correlation between the number of people in an individual’s network and an individual’s ability to influence. This suggests that selecting influencers to lead campaigns solely based on their follower count may not be as effective as working with individuals who have closer relationships in a smaller circle of friends. “Just because one of the large influencers has a hundred thousand followers does not necessarily [mean] that they are going to be able to be that effective in all products that they sell,” Sudhir said.
Continued application of the friendship paradox in varied economic settings could lead to fundamental changes in marketing campaigns, increasing effectiveness while reducing the need to collect large amounts of data prior to implementing marketing strategies. “The ideas are applicable across a variety of different contexts,” Sundhir said. “This is a great starting point for many people to follow up with interesting research.”