Daniel C. Smith

In Search of the Marketing Imagination: Factors Affecting the Creativity of Marketing Programs for Mature Products

The profitability of established products is affected greatly by the extent to which they are meaningfully differentiated from competing alternatives. Maintaining meaningful differentiation, in tur...

Product-Level Choice: A Top-Down or Bottom-Up Process?

Examination of the process by which consumers form decision criteria and subsequently evaluate and choose product-level alternatives when purchase goals are well defined indicates that decision criteria are formulated in a goal-driven, top-down fashion rather than a product-driven, bottom-up fashion. Evaluations of alternatives follows a within-product strategy, as opposed to a within-attribute strategy, and is characterized by less reliance on price information than reported in previous research. Even without a specific goal for product decisions, the formation and utilization of decision criteria did not follow the bottom-up process. Alternative explanations are offered for these contrasts along with implications for future research on product-level decisions. Copyright 1989 by the University of Chicago.

Rethinking the Effect of Perceived Fit on Customers' Evaluations of New Products

Prior research has demonstrated that customer evaluations of a new product are directly related to the degree to which a company’s skills are perceived to “fit” with those required to provide the new product. This finding has led to recommendations that firms focus on perceptually close new product areas. However, many firms have successfully entered perceptually distant markets. We reconcile this apparent contradiction by proposing that the effect of perceived fit on new product evaluation is not direct, but is mediated by the certainty a customer has that a company can deliver the proposed new product. Our findings indicate that, by itself, perceived fit has a positive impact on industrial product evaluations. However, the relationship between fit and new product evaluations, previously held to be direct, is instead mediated by customer certainty. That is, when the effect of customer certainty is considered, the direct effect of fit disappears. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

Product Class Competitors as Sources of Innovative Marketing Strategies

Describes an approach to competitive analysis that focuses on inter‐industry learning. Examines examples which show how the approach can provide insight into identifying new product opportunities, ways of repositioning existing products, and ways of adding value to existing products. Concludes that an inter‐industry learning strategy is more likely to succeed because it delivers innovative ideas while escaping the codes of conduct that develop within particular industries.

Couple competitive analysis to sales force decisions

Abstract Current approaches to competitive analysis typically provide information that is too general to be integrated into sales management decisions. This paper presents an approach to competitive analysis which uses customer evaluations of competing suppliers to generate intelligence that is tailored to the needs of sales managers. The proposed framework was developed through field research which involved nine different companies and selling situations. A case example is used to illustrate concepts central to the implementation of this approach.