The article “Understanding the quality–quantity conundrum of customer referral programs: effects of contribution margin, extraversion, and opinion leadership” which Manfred Krafft has co-authored with Vijay Viswanathan, Sebastian Tillmanns and Daniel Asselmann has been published by the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science.

In their article, the authors discuss how firms can substantially profit from customer referrals but that they must understand the different stages of the referral process to determine what drives the number of referrals, conversion, and average contribution margin per referral. Their findings show that extreme extraversion and opinion leadership diminish the positive effect of the contribution margins of referring customers on the number of referrals while their effect on the number of successful referrals is insignificant. In terms of the contribution margin of successful referrals, extraversion has a negative and opinion leadership a positive moderating effect.

The article is now available for download on Springer Online.