2015/07/24 by Helena Sofia Rodrigues, Rodrigues, Helena Sofia, Manuel José Fonseca +1 · 1 voice · 4 citations
Computer Science · Mathematics · Physics and Astronomy · Social Sciences · #34A34 #91F99 #92D30 #COVID-19 epidemiological studies #Digital Marketing and Social Media #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Physical sciences #Opinion Dynamics and Social Influence #Physics and Society (physics.soc-ph) #Social and Information Networks (cs.SI) #cs.SI #msc:34A34 #msc:91F99 #msc:92D30 #physics.soc-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1507.06986
This is a preprint of a paper whose final and definite form is in Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Computational and Mathematical Methods in Science and Engineering, 2015, pages 946 - 955
arxiv created 2015/07/24 · openalex publication_date 2015/07/24 · arxiv published 2015/07/24 · arxiv updated 2015/07/24 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
In epidemiology, an epidemic is defined as the spread of an infectious disease to a large number of people in a given population within a short period of time. In the marketing context, a message is viral when it is broadly sent and received by the target market through person-to-person transmission. This specific marketing communication strategy is commonly referred as viral marketing. Due to this similarity between an epidemic and the viral marketing process and because the understanding of the critical factors to this communications strategy effectiveness remain largely unknown, the mathematical models in epidemiology are presented in this marketing specific field. In this paper, an epidemiological model SIR (Susceptible- Infected-Recovered) to study the effects of a viral marketing strategy is presented. It is made a comparison between the disease parameters and the marketing application, and simulations using the Matlab software are performed. Finally, some conclusions are given and their marketing implications are exposed: interactions across the parameters are found that appear to suggest some recommendations to marketers, as the profitability of the investment or the need to improve the targeting criteria of the communications campaigns.