THE LESSON LEARNT FROM Chan & Misra. 1990. Characteristics of the opinion leader: A new dimension

In this paper, the authors analyzed the characteristics of opinion leaders (or givers). Historically, the opinion leaders were considered as important part in new-product adoption and diffusion, and venture business. In their personality, they tend to be less dogmatic, more innovative, more venturesome, likely to be confident in their appraisal of the product category, and more socially active. By analyzing 262 students and using Stepwise discriminant analysis, they found that contrary to previous findings, risk preference, dogmatism, and exposure to print media were not found to be significant discriminating characteristics of opinion leaders. But the product familiarity, personal involvement, and public individuation were significant in distinguishing opinion leaders from nonleaders (p. 57). The relationship between public individuation and opinion leadership is reasonable (p. 54).