Opinion leaders are motivated to give information or advice to others, in part doing so enhances their own status and self image and because such advice tends to reduce any post purchase dissonance that they may have. Other motives include product involvement, message involvement or any other involvement.
Opinion leadership is viewed as a monomorphic, domain-specific measure of individual differences, that is, a person that is an opinion leader in one field may be a follower in another field.
There are 3 types of opinion leadership, opinion leader, opinion seekers and opinion recipients. The progression by which individual (the opinion leader) informally influences the expenditure proceedings or thoughts of others who may be opinion seekers or opinion recipients.
Generally, Opinion leadership has a keen sense of knowledge and interest in the particular product or service area – perceived as having “expert power” and often receives information via non-personal sources – often reads magazines, special-interest publications or search the Internet for further information.
In fact, nowadays many well-recognized bloggers also act as an opinion leader. They write about product review, giving advice to their readers and answer reader comments or questions. As a consequence, I believe that blogger will become one of the significant gears in marketing and advertising.
The opinion leadership process is also known as word-of-mouth communications.We can clearly realized that word-of-mouth score the highest rates of influences among the entire channel. In most of the cases, words of mouth work best in restaurants.
