Opinion Leaders and Lead Users in Marketing and Management Accounting and Impact on Small Business Performance

Abstract

This paper empirically investigates into the business performance benefit that lead users or opinion leaders among small business owners draw from their higher involvement in management accounting or marketing topics. This work also contributes to a better identification of network members’ roles solely through their ties between each other. Indeed, lead users and opinion leaders can be differentiated by a higher degree centrality in comparison to their peers. However, being an opinion leader or a lead user does not yield a measurable business benefit to the small businesses studied in this sample.