Many firms use online brand communities to support the launch of their new products. This study proposes a typology of firm-hosted online brand communities and examines whether such a classification ...system can improve predictions of new product success. A cross-industry analysis of 81 firm-hosted online brand communities shows that these communities reflect three archetypes. A subsequent survey of 170 community-hosting firms in the consumer durable goods industry reveals that the three types of communities are not equally important for new product success. Moreover, one archetype generally underperforms the other two as a new product support mechanism. Overall, the results demonstrate that firm-hosted online brand communities can be a predictor of new product success.
Building a complex portfolio of products can be beneficial for young firms due to increased sales growth and competitiveness. Yet, the benefits from product portfolio complexity (PPC) are often ...outweighed by rising costs, leading to an inverted U-shaped relationship between PPC and performance. Recent research has called for an increased understanding of how firms are able to better manage higher levels of PPC. We suggest that absorptive capacity and ambidexterity are vital to enhancing the benefits and mitigating the costs of increasing PPC. Using a sample of 215 young high technology firms, we find support for positive moderating effects of absorptive capacity and ambidexterity on the inverted U-shaped relationship between PPC and firm performance.
This book discusses the most significant ways in which design has been applied to sustainability challenges using an evolutionary perspective. It puts forward an innovation framework that is capable ...of coherently integrating multiple design for sustainability (DfS) approaches developed so far. It is now widely understood that design can and must play a crucial role in the societal transformations towards sustainability. Design can in fact act as a catalyst to trigger and support innovation, and can help to shape the world at different levels: from materials to products, product–service systems, social organisations and socio-technical systems. This book offers a unique perspective on how DfS has evolved in the past decades across these innovation levels, and provides insights on its promising and necessary future development directions. For design scholars, this book will trigger and feed the academic debate on the evolution of DfS and its next research frontiers. For design educators, the book can be used as a supporting tool to design courses and programmes on DfS. For bachelor’s and master’s level design, engineering and management students, the book can be a general resource to provide an understanding of the historical evolution of DfS. For design practitioners and businesses, the book offers a rich set of practical examples, design methods and tools to apply the various DfS approaches in practice, and an innovation framework which can be used as a tool to support change in organisations that aim to integrate DfS in their strategy and processes. The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9780429456510, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
In today's competitive globalised business environment, production cost cutting is a primary issue before operation managers. As a research area, green lean six sigma (GLS) is proposed to have ...strategic importance in product development towards cutting costs, contributing to optimisation, and achieving sustainability. This research requirement has been realised to draw benefits out of three recent and involved approaches (green, lean and six sigma). In this research, an attempt has been made to address barriers in GLS product development (GLSPD) from an extensive literature review and from experts' opinions towards developing a hierarchical model structuring these barriers. Twenty-one barriers have been identified and sorted from the review of literature and were then validated through discussions with experts. Relationships (contextual in nature) among these barriers have been realised during a brainstorming session. An interpretive structural modelling (ISM) technique has been utilised for developing a hierarchical model of barriers in implementing the GLSPD process in the automobile sector of India. A nine-level structural model has been deduced after application of the ISM technique, which shows 'Competition and Uncertainty' as the topmost output of the model and 'Lack of Total Top Management Commitment' as the bottom-level input to other barriers of the model. Further, MICMAC analysis has been also done to classify these barriers for better understanding; seven barriers are identified as driver barriers, nine as dependent, five barriers as linkage and no barrier as autonomous. An analysis of interdependence and interactions among these barriers may help supply chain managers reach a better understanding of barriers. Thus, managers may be helped in prioritising and managing barriers in order to gain a competitive advantage from GLS concept implementation in product development.
Although the returns of customer participation on new product development (NPD) performance can vary substantially, the current literature lacks a systematic conceptual and empirical integration ...showing when customer participation is valuable in enhancing NPD performance. Building on knowledge management theory, the authors present a conceptual framework that synthesizes a variety of contingency factors. A meta-analysis empirically examines the moderating effects of contextual factors between customer participation and NPD performance. The analysis reveals that involving customers in the ideation and launch stages of NPD improves new product financial performance directly as well as indirectly through acceleration of time to market, whereas customer participation in the development phase slows down time to market, deteriorating new product financial performance. Furthermore, the benefits of customer participation on NPD performance are greater in technologically turbulent NPD projects, in emerging countries, in low-tech industries, for business customers, and for small firms. The authors discuss several theoretical and managerial implications about when to engage customers in the innovation process.
This paper examines the informational role of product ratings. We build a theoretical model in which ratings can help consumers figure out how much they would enjoy the product. In our model, a high ...average rating indicates a high product quality, whereas a high variance of ratings is associated with a niche product, one that some consumers love and others hate. Based on its informational role, a higher variance would correspond to a higher subsequent demand if and only if the average rating is low. We find empirical evidence that is consistent with the theoretical predictions with book data from Amazon.com and BN.com. A higher standard deviation of ratings on Amazon improves a book's relative sales rank when the average rating is lower than 4.1 stars, which is true for 35% of all the books in our sample.
This paper was accepted by Pradeep Chintagunta, marketing.
Product-harm crises are omnipresent in today's marketplace. Such crises can cause major revenue and market-share losses, lead to costly product recalls, and destroy carefully nurtured brand equity. ...Moreover, some of these effects may spill over to nonaffected competitors in the category when they are perceived to be guilty by association. The extant literature lacks generalizable knowledge on the effectiveness of different marketing adjustments that managers often consider to mitigate the consequences of such events. To fill this gap, the authors use large household-scanner panels to analyze 60 fast-moving consumer good product crises that occurred in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands and resulted in the full recall of an entire variety. The authors assess the effects of postcrisis advertising and price adjustments on the change in consumers' brand share and category purchases. In addition, they consider the extent to which the effects are moderated by two key crisis characteristics: the extent of negative publicity surrounding the event and whether the affected brand had to publicly acknowledge blame. Using the empirical findings, the authors provide context-specific managerial recommendations on how to overcome a product-harm crisis.
This research explores the relative influence of salespeople's attitudes toward selling a new product, perceptions of subjective norms, and self-efficacy on the development of selling intentions and, ...ultimately, the success of a new product launch. The longitudinal study employs a nonlinear growth curve model that leverages survey data from industrial salespeople and objective performance records of their daily sales during the first several months in the market of two new products: a new-to-market product and a line extension. By examining salesperson-level variance on new product performance, the authors suggest that managers should focus on increasing salesperson self-efficacy and positive attitudes toward selling the product to build selling intentions and quickly grow new product performance. They also suggest that sales managers should resist the temptation to rely on normative pressure during a new product introduction. Not only are subjective norms less effective in building selling intentions, but they also diminish the positive impact of attitudes and self-efficacy on salesperson intentions and constrain the positive relationships between intentions and performance and self-efficacy and performance.
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