The Effect of Marketing Breadth and Competitive Spread on Category Growth
研究了行业层面的营销活动如何通过营销广度和竞争分散度两个维度影响新产品品类在不同生命周期阶段的需求增长，发现两者对品类增长有不同影响。
Understanding the patterns of demand evolution for a new category is important for firms to effectively manage capacity planning, market and service operations, and research and development. Our objective is to analyze how marketing at the industry level affects the evolution of primary demand in different stages of the product life cycle. We characterize the aggregate marketing activities in two constructs: marketing breadth and competitive spread. The first construct reflects the spread of spending across different marketing instruments at the industry level, and the second construct reflects the spread of spending across different firms . Though both constructs are related to the spread of spending within a category, we find that they have qualitatively different effects on category growth. An econometric model making use of the hierarchical nature of time observations within countries is estimated for each category. First, we find that high degrees of spending breadth impede market growth when the number of competitors is small (the category is young) but accelerate market growth when the number of competitors is higher (the category is maturing). Second, we find that high levels of competitive spread decrease category growth when spending levels are relatively low. However, as spending levels increase, the negative effect of competitive spread on demand growth all but evaporates.