JAMS Q & A Article Feature
In this newsletter, we highlight a new JAMS article, “Dynamics of Pre-Release Consumer Buzz: Driving Communication, Search, and Participation for Market Performance,’’ which offers fresh insights and practical implications on pre-release consumer buzz. Alongside the publication, we feature an exclusive Q&A with the authors, where they share the inspiration behind their work, new insights uncovered, and practical advice for marketers. They also share the thoughts on how future research can extend this work across industries and emerging digital platforms.
Read the full article with open accee here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11747-024-01077-y
What inspired your team to explore the dynamics of pre-release consumer buzz?
We were inspired by the seminal work of Houston et al. (2018), who conceptualized pre-release consumer buzz as comprising three observable consumer behaviors: communication, search, and participation. Their framework provided a valuable theoretical foundation for understanding how consumers engage with new products before launch. However, in their empirical analysis, Houston and colleagues treated buzz as a unidimensional construct, without explicitly examining potential interdependencies and temporal dynamics among these three anticipatory behaviors. This gap highlighted an exciting opportunity for further research to explore how these dimensions interact and evolve over time, and how they may jointly influence market outcomes.
Moreover, two members of our author team attended a presentation at the 2019 European Marketing Academy Conference (EMAC) in Hamburg, Germany, which examined the causal effects of pre-release buzz on movie adoption (co-authored by Thorsten Hennig-Thurau and Ann-Kristin Kupfer, among others). This presentation not only deepened our conceptual understanding of pre-release consumer buzz but also demonstrated the practical relevance of studying buzz dynamics in entertainment industries characterized by high uncertainty and short product life cycles. The combination of these empirical inspirations and theoretical insights motivated us to develop our own research agenda to study the temporal and multi-behavioral nature of pre-release consumer buzz.
How has your methodology helped reveal new insights that prior research may have overlooked?
Our methodology revealed new insights primarily because we adopted a multi-behavioral, dynamic perspective, departing from prior research that often treated pre-release buzz as unidimensional or static.
We simultaneously investigated three distinct behaviors: communication (expressing views on platforms like X), search (actively seeking information via engines like Google), and participation (experiential activities like watching trailers on YouTube). Analyzing these components together allowed us to determine their relative importance in driving market performance, a finding that previous single-behavior studies could not provide. This approach revealed a clear hierarchy of impact: Communication is the strongest driver of opening weekend box office sales, with an elasticity of .23, followed by Participation at .09 and Search at .08. In practical terms, a 10% increase in communication activity translates to an approximate 2.3% increase in opening weekend box office performance. For a major blockbuster with a $100 million opening weekend, this boost would mean an additional $2.3 million in revenue.
We also integrated this multi-behavioral concept with a dynamic perspective to analyze how buzz evolves over time. Using a panel Vector Autoregressive Model with covariates (VAR-X) on daily data collected over the eight-week pre-release period for 330 movies, we captured the dynamic interdependencies within and across the three buzz behaviors. This revealed what we call "action-based buzz cascades," an empirical confirmation that buzz breeds buzz. Communication emerged as the dominant catalyst, showing the strongest spillover effects across all buzz behaviors.
Perhaps most surprisingly, our methodology challenged conventional wisdom about marketing effectiveness. By including firm marketing activities as variables in our model, we found that mass media advertising had no statistically significant effect on any pre-release buzz behavior. Conversely, movie-related social media posts proved to be the most effective driver of communication and search, while trailer releases were substantially more powerful for stimulating participation.
What advice would you offer marketers when designing pre-release marketing for entertainment or similar products?
First, prioritize communication to drive buzz cascades. Given communication’s superior impact on sales and its powerful spillover effects that amplify other buzz behaviors, marketing activities should aim to strategically stimulate audience conversations about upcoming films to build momentum toward their release.
Deploy social media strategically for content, not just trailers. Movie-related social media posts that do not feature trailers are the most effective tools for driving communication and search behavior. Marketers should direct resources toward creating and disseminating engaging, shareable content (e.g., behind-the-scenes material or character profiles) well before release. These posts are three to five times more effective at stimulating communication than trailer-related posts.
While social media content drives conversation, trailer releases are substantially more powerful for driving participatory behaviors. This aligns with the experiential nature of trailers, which provide audiences with a tangible “taste” of the product.
Second, start early to maximize dynamic effects. Buzz is not static; it reinforces itself and cross-pollinates across behaviors. To benefit from these cumulative, self-reinforcing dynamics, industry professionals should start building buzz at least eight weeks before release. Marketing activities should be temporally sequenced, ideally beginning with movie-related social media content to stimulate communication and search, followed by strategic trailer releases to drive participation.
Third, reconsider mass media advertising allocation. Traditional mass media advertising plays no significant role in generating pre-release buzz. While advertising continues to directly influence conversion, studios should consider recalibrating their marketing mix to shift substantial resources from traditional advertising toward strategic online engagement tools that effectively generate buzz.
Looking ahead, how can future studies build on your work to examine pre-release buzz in other industries or on emerging platforms?
The platform economy is rapidly evolving. While our study focused on platforms relevant to the mass market, future research should examine how pre-release buzz operates on emerging platforms such as TikTok, Snapchat, and Discord. These platforms appeal highly to younger audiences and feature different content styles, such as shorter, more visually engaging content. Understanding how the effectiveness of pre-release marketing activities depends on specific audience and channel characteristics could help fine-tune campaigns.
Our research is set in the movie industry, but future studies should explore whether our findings generalize to other industries that increasingly use pre-release marketing campaigns to create anticipation, such as fashion and consumer electronics. Research is needed to identify potential boundary conditions for the drivers and the impact of pre-release consumer buzz across these different contexts.
The finding that mass media advertising has no significant effect on generating buzz is surprising and warrants deeper investigation. Future studies could address this puzzling finding by focusing on advertising content rather than just spending. It remains an open question whether advertising can generate buzz only under specific circumstances, such as when it includes explicit calls to action that encourage consumers to engage in buzz behaviors.
Finally, given the macroeconomic changes in the entertainment industry, such as the rise of streaming and shrinking theatrical release windows, future research should examine the short- and long-term effects of pre-release consumer buzz across multiple distribution channels. This would require alternative outcome measures beyond box office sales, such as hours streamed or subscriber growth.
Schreiner, T.F., Mandler, T., van Heerde, H.J. et al. Dynamics of pre-release consumer buzz: Driving communication, search, and participation for market performance. J. of the Acad. Mark. Sci. 53, 1261–1281 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-024-01077-y
