[1] To create loyalty and advocacy towards a brand, seeding trials take advantage of opinion leadership to enhance sales, capitalizing on the Hawthorne Effect.
[2] Seeding trials in medicine are not illegal but are considered unethical because they "deceive investigators, clinicians, and patients, subverting the scientific process".
[1][6][7] The obfuscation of true trial objectives (primarily marketing) prevents the proper establishment of informed consent for patient decisions.
[6][10] The 2003 study was originally published in the Annals of Internal Medicine[11] but was strongly criticized for its deception by the journal's editors in a 2008 editorial, calling for greater responsibility in academia to end the practice of "marketing in the guise of science".
In a marketing seeding program, a company offers some sort of promotion (free product, discounts, service trials, etc.)
[15] Companies that have used seeding trials include Procter & Gamble, Microsoft, Hasbro, Google, Unilever, Pepsi, Coke, Ford, DreamWorks SKG, EMI, Sony, and Siemens.
They argue that with time, the “proximity-and similarity-based strategy” performs best because the similarity effect begins to affect new and distant areas.
Namely, serving many small pools of similar buyers demographically, who are geographically distant from one another, is crucial for an Internet retailer because then sales increase over time.
This handful of unique people can spread the word around and create a social epidemic through their connections, charm, personality, expertise and persuasiveness.
The notion that a small group of people can influence others and cause them to adopt products, services or behaviors was the subject of another book, The Influentials by Edward Keller and Jonathan Berry.
[24] On the other side of the debate, some argue that influencers have no such effect and therefore companies shouldn't target their seeding efforts on a specific group of people.
Duncan Watts and Peter Dodds examined the phenomenon through a computer network simulation under the assumption that influential people are more difficult to influence, therefore social hubs have a lower tendency to adopt new products.