Fission marketing on social media platforms with consumer sentiment considerations

Fission marketing is important for e-commerce platforms to import new consumers from social media platforms. However, fission marketing may bring social pressure, resulting in consumer loss and poor platform reputation. We study fission marketing decisions under reputation-based and discount-based models, considering three fission marketing degrees of non-fission, moderate fission, and extensive fission. Our findings demonstrate that the platform can adopt fission marketing with a high sales price. Extensive fission can be the most effective in improving profits when with either more fission marketing preference consumers or a high sales price, and a small cost coefficient of fission marketing. Otherwise, moderate fission is the best choice. Specifically, by employing reputation-based marketing, extensive fission can always generate more demand, while adopting discount-based marketing, owing to consumer’s aversion sentiment, extensive fission may lead to less demand than moderate fission. Extending models to consider endogenous price, we find deceptive marketing behavior may exist.