Eunsang Yoon

The effects of information and company reputation on intentions to buy a business service

Abstract The authors review the literature on the roles and sources of company reputation and report the results of an empirical study. Using business insurance service data, the study tests the proposition that a companys reputation and its service offering information collectively determine a buyers expectations. In turn, expectations, reputation, and information impact buying intention. The empirical evidence suggests that (1) a buyers response to a service is consistent with his/her attitude toward the vendors reputation, (2) the common factor underlying a companys reputation is primarily uni-dimensional, and (3) the effectiveness of a specific communications program can be enhanced by utilizing the companys reputation.

New Industrial Product Performance: The Effects of Market Characteristics and Strategy

Theres no need to state again the complexity ofthe problem of achieving high pe

Determinants of new industrial product performance: a strategic re-examination of the empirical literature

ormance in the new product process. What we do need is a framework to help sort out the complexity, and that is what Eunsang Yoon and Gary Lilien provide in this article. They first dzferentiate between original and reformulated new products. Then they examine how patterns of R&D and marketing activities determine short and long-run success.

Modeling global market entry decision by fuzzy logic with an application to country risk assessment

Research on the determinants of industrial innovation performance using a three-dimensional framework is examined. Those dimensions are: generality over innovations, decision focus, and managerial controllability. The major determinants identified are: strategic and organizational factors, including general managements support, business-project fit, and RD RD and market and environmental factors, including degree of competition and market growth. An empirical study of 112 industrial products confirms that dynamic interaction exists between these determinants and the launch time of the product. >

Marketing and production capacity strategy for non-differentiated products: Winning and losing at the capacity cycle game

Abstract This research introduces a fuzzy logic framework to support global market entry decision. We present a fuzzy evaluation method to handle recursive problematical issues arising from the imprecision conveyed by natural language, such as inaccurate measures, ambiguous facts, subjective analyses, and imperfect decision rules that characterize the market-entry decision-making process. The components of the method are described and are applied specifically to assess the level of country risk, a principal category of market evaluation. A case situation is developed to illustrate how the method analyzes and integrates political and social risks, foreign exchange rate, and trade balance.

Characteristics of the industrial distributor's innovation activities: An exploratory study

Abstract Customer satisfaction and supplier loyalty in markets where products are mainly undifferentiated are heavily affected by assurance of supply. Marketers manage production capacity in such markets to assure supply, but the resulting capacity competition leads to cycles of over-capacity followed by capacity deletions, which lead to under-capacity. We investigate some of the possible causes of this form of industry behavior in two ways. First, we report on an exploratory empirical investigation, motivated by in-depth interviews with industry executives, and develop a set of structural principles. We formalize those principles in a set of statistical models. Next, we review some related theory and identify a number of possible reasons that may combine to cause this phenomenon. We develop some simple, game theoretic models that focus on the issues of strategic interaction with demand uncertainty and different values of capacity change. We use the theory results to illustrate how over- and under-capacity situations arise. We compare our theoretical and empirical results and find an encouraging degree of convergence. We discuss the implications of these findings for individual firm strategies.

Market-based pricing: Beyond price-performance curves

Abstract Recent trends in industrial distribution suggest that distributors may perform an important role in various stages of product innovation from idea generation, through product design, to product launch and subsequent marketing. In this article, Eunsang Yoon and Gary Lilien review the literature and discuss the potential role of the industrial distributor as an innovation participant. An exploratory study with an Australian data base suggests that the industrial distributor performs tasks associated with market-driven product innovation (reformulation and imitative new products in particular) as effectively as the industrial manufacturer.

Pricing imitative new products

Abstract In this article we extend the concept of price-performance curves to a methodology of value-based pricing for industrial markets. The concept of price-performance curves and the limitations of its traditional application as a pricing tool are discussed. We broaden the simple price-performance curve into a market-based performance-price analysis. A step-by-step procedure is proposed.

Methods of country risk assessment for international market-entry decision

Abstract This article develops an operational procedure for pricing an imitative new product that targets business customers. We view entry pricing as a component of overall entry strategy and suggest that an effective pricing must be consistent with the products user-benefit, market-entry time, and overall positioning strategy. The results confirm that the entry price is positively associated with the products user-benefit and negatively related to the products entry time.

Characteristics of the Industrial Distributor's Innovation Activities

Researchers and practitioners of international market entry typically have a difficult task obtaining and processing requisite information to evaluate potential opportunities and risks. Essential analysis is often confounded by inappropriate measures of input requirements, inadequately defined information categories, and the overall complex nature of the decision process. In partial response to these issues, this research introduces a three-stage guiding framework for market-entry decision and presents alternative methodologies for country risk assessment, a principal component in the final stage. A variety of discrete methods are included such as subjective interaction by deliberating experts, scoring models, the analytic hierarchy process, simulation, and statistical designs using regression or factor analysis. New analytic rule-based nondiscrete techniques utilizing fuzzy logic are also introduced. Fuzzy logic simulates natural discourse and analogical reasoning through inference about nebulous facts and inexact concepts, using rules that do not require a perfect match between input data and their antecedental values in order to fire. It provides formal mathematical structure for representing, evaluating, and interpreting linguistic context. It is especially useful for handling problematical issues such as imprecise data, ambiguous information, vague meanings of terms, and inconsistent analyses that characterize the general market-entry problem and risk assessment in particular. Numerical examples demonstrate how discrete and fuzzy models work to integrate political, social, and financial risks.