A simulation study on the roles of heterogeneous participants in online communities during a brand crisis

With the power of the internet and the popularity of online communities, it is critical to view brand crisis management from a new perspective and gain more insights about how public opinions towards brands are formed in online communities. This paper proposed an agent-based simulation model to investigate the different roles of heterogeneous participants in opinion formation in online communities during a brand crisis, developed a simulator and implemented simulation experiments in the platform of Netlogo5.0. On the basis of analysis and discussion on the simulation experiment results, some significative conclusions about the roles of loyal customers and opinion leaders in diverse situations have been drawn out.