品牌原产地效应及其市场策略建议--基于欧、美、日、中四地品牌形象调查分析

品牌原产地是国际市场营销领域重要研究议题。在欧、美、日等地区广泛实证和推广 ,但迄今仍缺少对中国市场品牌原产地评价及其对品牌信念及购买的效应的系统研究。本文在文献回顾基础上 ,建立了品牌原产地效应的理论模型 ,提出理论关系假设 ,抽取京、沪、穗、渝四市共 10 0 5个成人消费者样本 ,运用相关分析、T检验等方法进行实证研究。研究测量出中国市场对欧、美、日、中四地的原产地评价 ,发现国产品牌形象评分总体上为负面 ,并低于美日品牌 ,但在某些产品类别已显示出相对优势。研究结论证实了品牌原产地对消费者品牌信念和品牌购买意向的显著性作用。本文讨论上述研究结论对中外企业市场营销策略的借鉴 ,并提出进一步研究的方向。     

企业社会责任相对水平与消费者购买意向关系的实证研究

行业内的相对企业社会责任(CSR)水平与消费者购买意向关系的实证研究表明:行业内的相对CSR水平高(或低),消费者购买意向也相应地高(或低);消费者能够接受的CSR处于行业领先水平企业的产品提价的幅度显著小于要求CSR处于行业落后水平企业的产品降价的幅度;在参照对象分别为CSR处于行业落后水平企业的产品和参照对象为CSR处于行业中等水平企业的产品时,消费者对CSR处于行业领先水平企业的产品的购买意向存在显著差异,但愿意接受的提价幅度没有显著差异。     

Product Cue Usage in Two Asian Markets: A Cross-Cultural Comparison

In this paper, we report cross-cultural differences in the use of intrinsic and extrinsic product cues (physical quality, design, brand name and price) on consumers' evaluations and purchase intentions for an apparel product in Shanghai, China and Seoul, South Korea. There were some differences in Chinese and Korean consumers' use of these cues in assessing the quality, value and purchase intentions; however, differences were not extensive. Consumers in both countries relied heavily on price acceptability to determine the value of the product; however, it was used to a greater extent among Chinese consumers to determine value. Our findings revealed that design was another intrinsic product attribute that impacts product evaluations and purchase decisions for both Chinese and Korean consumers. However, design was a stronger predictor of purchase intentions among Korean consumers. Brand name was not a strong cue in product evaluations for consumers in either country, although it was a significant predictor of value perceptions among Chinese consumers.     

Complementarity, coordination and compatibility: The role of fixed costs in the economics of systems

We analyze industry equilibrium and incentive to compatibility when goods produced by different producers generate utility only when consumed as component parts of a system. We assume the presence of two systems, each composed of some basic component and a set of differentiated complementary products. The combination of complementarity between the two components of the system and of fixed costs in the production of the complementary product results in a form of network effect. We focus on the role played by the size of the fixed costs in the production of the complementary products in determining the size of this system effect and, by this means, the structure and types of equilibria that may be observed: monopolistic or duopolistic, symmetric or asymmetric. We also highlight the consequence of the same fixed costs for the private and social incentives to render the systems compatible.     

The impact of technology advancement strategies on consumers' patronage decisions

Among the many factors that encourage return patronage of incumbent technology, two that have received scholarly attention in other contexts are network externalities and switching costs. However, the roles of network externalities and switching costs in encouraging return patronage of technology have not yet been subjected to rigorous empirical testing. Furthermore, no examination has been conducted of the degree to which these factors play a role in the success or failure of corporate technology advancement strategies designed to encourage return patronage. In this context, we propose a systematic framework to explore the nature of the links between technology advancement strategies and consumer technology patronage via network externalities and switching costs. Based on consumer survey data from South Korea, we find empirical support for the link between technology advancement strategies and consumers' technology patronage. Specifically, both network externalities and switching costs are found to be positively associated with technology patronage. According to this study, consumers value compatibility because it gives them access to a larger network. Further, compatibility strategy is associated with the costs involved in switching away from incumbent technology because of an abundant or varied supply of complementary goods. The results also show that preannouncement is a key marketing strategy to achieve favorable expectations and to retain the patronage of current technology users. © 2002 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.     

构建基于三重底线的绿色供应链:欧盟与美国的环境规制比较

一方面,环境日益恶化、资源日益匮乏,解决环境问题的绿色供应链构建受到普遍关注;另一方面,产品质量安全和产品本身缺陷的大量曝光及其召回事件,严重威胁着消费者的健康收益。文中首先以三重底线原则(经济底线、社会底线和环境底线)和产品外部性为基础,将绿色供应链分为两类:以关注消费者健康收益为核心的社会底线供应链、以关注环境生态收益为核心的环境底线供应链。接着,比较了欧盟的延伸生产者责任和美国的产品安全监管策略。最后,从产品生命周期不同阶段,经济、社会与环境等视角,以生产者、消费者与政府为对象,分析并得出:构建社会底线供应链需要完善的内部揭发机制与召回机制相结合;构建环境底线供应链需要减缓产品引入速度,以及面向环境的产品设计与综合性回收网络相结合。     

Optimal best-price policy

A best-price policy (BP) is a promise by a seller to give her customer a refund if she reduces her price after the customer has already purchased the product. We characterize the optimal BP policy as when the seller can control both the policy length (when the promise expires) and the refund scale (what portion of the price difference is refunded). We explain why the policy length is finite and varies across industries. In a setting where consumers' valuations decline over time, we show that a finite-length BP allows the seller to commit to not lowering her price too soon, while at the same time letting her capture some of the benefits of intertemporal price discrimination. However, because the decline in consumers' valuations is uncertain, a BP does not allow the monopolist to achieve the profit she could earn with a full commitment.     

The Role of Objective In Vivo Testing in the Product Development Process

New products managers are continually confronted by the challenge of coordinating flows of complex information during the product development process. Among the issues faced are unique problems in relating technical design of product attributes to customers' reactions, leading to an improvement of the product's benefits. Ronald Drozdenko and Sidney Weinstein describe a variety of tests which help to assess customers' reactions to products, thus providing information to improve the design or to substantiate advertising claims. The term "objective in vivo" is given to a category of tests which is employed to quantify consumers' evaluation of specific product attributes under controlled, simulated use conditions. This helps to bridge the gap between tests which are designed to measure the physical or functional aspects of new products and tests which measure the consumers' self-reported, subjective reactions. A test categorization model, illustrative case studies, and test selection criteria are presented.     

Compatibility and Bundling with Generalist and Specialist Firms

I analyze compatibility and bundling choices when one generalist firm offering both components of a system competes against two specialist firms each supplying one component only (but not the same one). I show that the generalist firm may have an incentive to choose incompatibility or engage in pure bundling when one component is less differentiated than the other. In this case, the system is more differentiated than the relatively undifferentiated component, and so under incompatibility the specialist firm that produces the undifferentiated component will relax price competition. This may result in higher profits for some of the competing firms.     

Technology revolutions in the presence of network externalities

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of varying consumer preferences over technology advance and network size on the timing and frequency of new technology adoption in the presence of installed bases resulting from network externalities. The paper shows that the duration of each adopted technology and the frequency of technology adoptions depend on (a) whether (in consumers' perspectives) the network size effect is a substitute for or a complement to the quality of the technologies; (b) the degree of compatibility of new technologies with the old technology; and (c) the technology growth rate and consumer population size.     

公司品牌形象对经销商关系导向的影响——基于主导地位制造商的中国实证

迄今学术界偏重于研究公司品牌形象对消费者产品反应的影响。本研究检验公司品牌形象对经销商关系导向的影响。本文检验了公司品牌的能力和诚信两个因素影响经销商经济满意度和社交满意度,进而影响其关系导向的机制。研究发现,诚信对经销商经济满意度和社交满意度的影响效应大于能力;社交满意度对关系导向的影响效应大于经济满意度。研究显示,处于主导地位的制造商,当务之急是改善诚信形象,这将有助于提升经销商整体满意度,强化经销商的长期关系导向。论文讨论了研究结论对企业营销战略的借鉴意义,指出了局限性及未来研究方向。     

Contingent Product Design and Marketing Strategies Influencing New Product Success and Failure in U.S. and Japanese Electronics Firms

The commercial success or failure of a product doesn't rest solely on the whims of the marketplace. The myriad, often interdependent, strategic trade-offs made throughout the product development process go a long way toward determining whether a product succeeds or fails. The key to success often rests in finding the right combination of product design and market choice decisions. Toward that end, William E. Souder and X. Michael Song examine the relationship between product success and several product design and market choice strategies. In particular, they explore the possibility that the correct strategy combination differs depending on a firm's perception of market uncertainty, which they measure in terms of the respondents' perceived familiarity with the market for a product, perceived understanding of customer needs, and perceived capability to translate those needs into product performance specifications. Recognizing that the correct combination of strategic choices may also depend on firm size, industry, and culture, the study focuses on small U.S. suppliers of electronics components. Fortune 500 producers of electronics final products, and Japanese producers of electronics final products. For the small U.S. firms in the study, an emphasis on performance superiority, technical superiority, or radically new products provides a recipe for failure under low market uncertainty. Even under high market uncertainty, these characteristics do not equate to success for the small U.S. firms in this study. The findings suggest that these firms should focus on design compatibility with a purchaser's installed base. The responses from Fortune 500 firms and Japanese companies indicate that under low market uncertainty these larger organizations should consider emphasizing compatibility and avoiding radical designs. For markets that the larger firms perceive to be highly uncertain, the results suggest that these companies should emphasize performance superiority, technical superiority, and radical designs. The findings related to market choice strategies also support the notion that the correct combination of strategic decisions depends on firm size, culture, and the perceived level of market uncertainty. However, the guidelines presented in this study should not be construed as hard-and-fast rules for formulating product strategy. Instead, the results presented here will be helpful for challenging assumptions and guiding actions, as one element in the effort to shape an effective product strategy.     

The Role of Resource Access, Market Considerations, and the Nature of Innovation in Pursuit of Standards in the New Product Development Process

Standards influence new product development (NPD) in high‐technology markets. However, existing work on standards has focused exclusively on one aspect of standards—compatibility standards. This article has the following goals. First, we delineate the concept of customer interface standards as distinct from compatibility standards. This distinction is important from a product development and technology adoption perspective. Second, we propose and show that antecedent factors may motivate a firm differently about the emphasis that the firm should put on a type of standard (compatibility or customer interface) that it follows. For example, we propose that appropriability regime affects pursuit of customer interface standards and compatibility standards differently. Finally, we illustrate how resource access and the nature of the innovation also influence a firm's decision to pursue a standard type. Finally, we propose that pursuit of different standards (customer interface or compatibility) affects the NPD process in terms of (1) sourcing and dissemination of technology and (2) the customer utility for the product, which influences adoption. We collected perceptual data from a sample of marketing and technology managers in high‐tech industries in the UK using both formative and reflective scales to measure the constructs. Analysis of the data using LISREL supports our contention that compatibility standards and customer interface standards are distinct constructs and that appropriability regime influences compatibility standards and customer interface standards differently. We also find that pursuit of compatibility standards helps a firm to create direct externalities pursuit of customer interface standards helps firms to develop indirect network externalities and technological advantage in the market. Our findings have the following implications. First, managers need to account explicitly for the difference between compatibility and customer interface standards, as resource allocation decisions during the NPD process will determine where a firm puts more focus. The choices made by the firm—as to whether it pursues compatibility standards or customer interface standards—will determine the type of advantage that it can gain in the market. Given a firm's situation at a point in time, a greater focus on one standard type rather than the other may be the right approach. Such choices will influence resource allocation in the product development process.     

The choice at the checkout: Quantifying demand across payment instruments

Dramatic changes have occurred in the U.S. payment system over the past two decades, most notably an explosion in electronic card-based payments. This shift has led to a series of policy debates driven in part by consumers' choice of payment instruments. Using a new nationally representative survey, we transform consumer responses to open-ended questions into product rankings and estimate a characteristics-based rank-order logit model in order to quantify consumer substitution among payment methods. Our estimates are then used to conduct supply-driven and demand-driven counterfactual experiments in order to estimate market share and cost effects. From a counterfactual experiment in which merchants stop accepting credit cards, we predict merchant costs to decline substantially. Because merchants accept credit cards nonetheless, we regard our finding as evidence either that the credit card networks hold market power, or that merchants experience unmeasured intangible benefits from credit card acceptance. We also predict that contactless debit will take market share from cash, checks, and credit, and that the age/cohort effect alone is unlikely to cause debit card use to increase substantially over a 10-year period.     

The Impact of Communication Strategy on Launching New Products: The Moderating Role of Product Innovativeness

Academic literature is filled with debate on whether product innovativeness positively impacts new product performance (NPP) because of increasing competitive advantage or negatively impacts performance due to consumers' fears of novel technology and resultant resistance to adopt. This study investigates this issue by modeling product innovativeness as a moderator that influences the relationship between communication strategy and new product performance. The authors emphasize that the impact of innovativeness to producers is different from that to consumers and that the differences have strategic impact when commercializing highly innovative products. Product innovativeness is conceptualized as multidimensional, and each dimension is tested separately. Four dimensions of innovativeness are explored—product newness to the firm, market newness to the firm, product superiority to the customer, and adoption difficulty for the customer.
In this study, communication strategy is comprised of preannouncement strategy and advertising strategy. First, the relationship between whether or not a preannouncement is offered and NPP is explored. Then three types of preannouncement messages (customer education, anticipation creation, and market preemption) are investigated. Advertising strategy is characterized by whether the advertisement campaign at the time of launch was based primarily on emotional or functional appeals.
Using empirical results from 284 surveys of product managers, the authors find that the relationship between communication strategy and NPP is moderated by innovativeness, and that the relationships differ not only by degree but also by type of innovativeness. Implications for research and practice are discussed.     

Redesigning Product Lines with Conjoint Analysis: How Sunbeam Does It

Sunbeam Appliance Company, faced with the task of redesigning its lines of small appliances, developed a procedure that couples consumers' evaluations of possible new designs with a marketing research technique—conjoint analysis. In this article, Albert Page and Harold Rosenbaum describe Sunbeam's redesign of its food processor product line. They report detailed information, including key design attributes, alternative product designs, market segments, and competitive positions, and describe the use of a simulation model that predicts the market share of alternative product line configurations before they are even developed or introduced into the market. The procedure provides product line managers with a powerful tool to assist them in redesigning their lines.     

Product Development Strategy and Organizational Learning: A Tale of Two PC Makers

The personal computer (PC) marketplace in the US presents a dizzying array of component suppliers and products. No single firm dominates the industry with a complete package of hardware and software components. Although one company's operating systems and general-purpose applications are installed on most PCs in the US, the other system components—processors, memory, storage devices, display adapters, monitors, specialized applications, and so on—come from any number of sources. David T. Methe, Ryoko Toyama, and Junichiro Miyabe point out that the PC industry in Japan also exhibits this decentralized nature. However, they also note that despite the decentralized network structure of the Japanese PC industry, one company—NEC—was able to achieve a dominant market share. To provide insight into the key issues involved in the management of complex technology, they contrast NEC's strategic approach to product development and organizational learning with the approaches taken by Fujitsu—the firm that placed a distant second in this market. Despite matching NEC in terms of technological capabilities, financial resources, and managerial talent, Fujitsu never managed to threaten NEC's dominance of the PC market in Japan. Fujitsu continually emphasized technological leadership, even at the expense of protecting its installed base. Poor coordination of resources and product development efforts resulted in incompatibilities among Fujitsu's various products, and the company failed to foster close relationships with suppliers of such key technologies as software and peripherals. NEC's PCs did not enjoy the advantages of first-to-market status or technological leadership. Instead, NEC achieved market dominance by finding the combination of product technologies that met the needs of the greatest number of consumers. Throughout almost 20 years of competition in the PC industry, NEC successfully maintained consistency and backward compatibility across its product lines. NEC also recognized the importance of third-party software developers, and carefully cultivated relations with these firms as a source of competitive advantage. In other words, NEC struck the right balance between three key factors: technological innovation, motivation of third-party developers of software and peripherals, and service to its installed base of customers.     

企业社会责任运动测评指标体系实证研究--消费者视角

本文基于消费者视角，开发了一组用于测评企业社会责任运动的量表体系并对其进行了实证检验。这组测评体系共包含16个具体的指标，构成回馈社会、赞助教育文化等社会公益事业、保护消费者权益、保护自然环境、承担经济方面的责任等五个维度。实证检验结果显示其具有较高的测评信度和效度．基于该量表体系所测评的企业社会责任运动业绩感知水平与消费者的企业信赖感和忠诚度显著相关。研究结论反映了中国消费者对企业承担社会责任的期待和评价标准．为研究人员提供了一个测评企业社会责任运动的工具，也为企业开展社会责任运动指出了具体方向。     

Innovation in the Systems Business: Dynamics of Autonomy and Cooperation

Even though the many hardware and software components that comprise a useful computer system are developed and offered as individual products, the required technical integration of these provides unique challenges for R&D management. New function, especially that provided by software, usually results from prototypes that are not well integrated with the existing product line. This article examines the problems of managing the conflicting demands of market-based autonomy and systems requirements for integration. The idea about software innovation is an interesting complement to the two articles that follow.     

企业社会责任行为与消费者响应——消费者个人特征和价格信号的调节

本文从捐助慈善事业、保护环境以及善待员工三个层次,对企业承担社会责任行为与我国消费者响应的关系进行了实证研究。数据分析结果表明,三个层次的企业社会责任行为对消费者购买意向和产品质量感知均有显著影响。本文发现,企业社会责任行为与消费者响应之间的复杂关系,既受到消费者个人特征(如消费者是否支持企业社会责任行为(CSR-support))的影响,也受到产品自身特征(如价格信号)的影响。另外,本文也发现消费者对不同层次的企业社会责任行为的响应存在差别。