In marketing circles a whole alphabet soup of terms is used to describe concepts similar to the concept of network hubs: Champions, happy customers, lead users, and so on.
Let’s start with what network hubs are. Network hubs are what researchers call “opinion leaders.” In academic literature opinion leadership is defined as “the degree to which an individual can informally influence other individual’s attitude or overt behavior in a desired way with relative frequency.” a network hub is a leader as it immediately connotes someone whom others seek to follow.
It’s important to understand what network hubs are not: Network hubs are not champions, lead users or happy customers. These terms are used to describe customers whop are happy or satisfies with a product or service. Companies make the mistake of jumping to the conclusion that satisfied customers are influential in their own networks. There exists no evidence for the correlation of the two. A single satisfied customer has very little to do with his centrality in a network.
For example: Consider a company marketing cosmetics to a school. A teacher in that school is a satisfied customer of the company however the company’s sales from that school are not increasing. The reason for this maybe that the teacher may not be a network hub at all even though she is a satisfied customer. And also it is possible that another teacher using cosmetics of another brand could be influencing the usage patterns of other teachers.
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