Brand and Product Management

Consumers make multi-category decisions in a variety of contexts such as choice of multiple categories during a shopping trip. While complementarity gives managers some control over consumers' buying behavior, co-occurrence or co-incidence is less controllable. Other acts that may affect multi-category choice may be household preferences or household demographics. Not accounting for these 3 factors simultaneously could lead to erroneous inferences.

For most firms, successful new product introductions are rare, and failed products represent substantial monetary loss, particularly at the market launch stage. Unfortunately, the ability to reliably predict successes/failures early in the new product development process remains an elusive goal.

Generalized knowledge comes from cumulating results across studies, a process known as meta-analysis. Efficiently increasing generalized knowledge in a defined area-estimates of price or advertising, for example-is one important goal for research. Because (1) most meta-analyses are based on highly inefficient and unbalanced natural experiments or designs and (2) additional studies are costly, carefully selecting the next study is important.

Why has the service factory model failed to live up to its original promise? To answer this question, we start with a basic concept: service is doing the work of your customer. As a result, it requires a high level of contact, communication and coordination with your customers. To deliver truly excellent service, therefore, requires a level of customer intimacy. That is, a service provider needs to know individual customers being served in order to deliver service that, in addition to being efficient, is also personal and effective in fulfilling their total service requirements.

Two and three-dimensional variants of Hotelling's (1929) model of differentiated products are analyzed. In the setup, consumers can place different importances on each product attribute; these are measured by weights on the disutility of distance in each dimension. Two firms play a two-stage game; they choose locations in stage 1 and prices in stage 2. Subgame-perfect equilibria are sought. It is found that all such equilibria have maximal differentiation in one dimension only; in all other dimensions they have minimum differentiation.

The accelerated pace of technological change has led to rapid obsolescence of productive capacity in electronics and other industries. Managers must consider the impact of future technologies while making acquisition and replacement decisions in such environments. We consider a problem where a sequence of technological breakthroughs are anticipated but their magnitude and timing are uncertain. A firm, operating in such an environment, must decide how much capacity of the current technology to acquire to meet future demand growth.

Marketing Aesthetics offers clear guidelines for harnessing a company's total aesthetic output — its "look and feel" — to provide a vital competitive advantage.

This paper presents a stochastic multidimensional unfolding (MDU) procedure to spatially represent individual differences in phased or sequential decision processes. The specific application or scenario to be discussed involves the area of consumer psychology where consumers form judgments sequentially in their awareness, consideration, and choice set compositions in a phased or sequential manner as more information about the alternative brands in a designated product/service class are collected.