Persuasion
The bandwagon effect is the tendency to adopt a behaviour or a belief because many other people already have.
The name comes from nineteenth-century American politics, when the band's wagon led election parades and ‘jumping on the bandwagon’ meant siding with whoever seemed to be winning; the economist Harvey Leibenstein brought it into demand theory in 1950. The more an idea spreads, the more followers it attracts, regardless of the evidence for it. For a company it is the risk of chasing market trends without asking whether they serve its own customers; for marketing it is a lever, related to social proof.
An example
A company opens an account on an emerging social network only because its competitors have, without knowing whether its audience is there.
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