Opening the Black Box of Buzzing Bloggers: Understanding How Consumers Deal with the Tension between Authenticity and Commercialism in seeded Word of Mouth Campaigns

Word-of-mouth (WOM) marketing has gained ground as a powerful communication tool. One way in which marketers tap into consumers' WOM potential is by seeding products to influencers. These consumers take on a dual role, being both target and agent in the WOM episode. Because of cultural contradictions between the roles of consumer (authenticity) and marketer (commercialism), this dual role is likely to cause tension. This paper examines how consumer-agents and final target consumers deal with this duality by means of a netnographic study and experiments.