【主题】Impact of Information Technology on Marketing Strategy
【时间】2005-7-6上午9:30 – 12:00
【地点】经管学院伟伦楼北401
【语言】中文/英文
【内容摘要】
The internet and other rapidly evolving information and communication technologies have greatly altered the marketing landscape, creating new market forces and offering new marketing advantages to those who best grasp the strategic effects of these changes. In this presentation, I will discuss some of my recent work on the effects of information technology on marketing strategy. I will focus on three areas: (1) independent product information, (2) advance selling, and (3) network effects and standards competition.
Area 1: Independent Product Information
One emerging market phenomenon is the increasing popularity of product information produced by independent sources. The internet and fast-developing information technology have significantly reduced both information-delivery cost and information-retrieval cost. Many popular consumer magazines and websites (e.g., PC Magazine, Consumer Reports, Car and Driver, CNET.com, ZDNET.com) regularly publish comprehensive product reviews based on independent laboratory tests and expert evaluations. An increasing number of online sellers (e.g., Amazon.com, circuitcity.com, wine.com) invite users to post personal product evaluations on the sellers’ websites. Several recent papers (Chen and Xie, 2004, 2005), examine when and how a manufacturing firm should adapt its marketing strategies to such independent product information. For example, should a firm receiving an unfavorable third-party review reduce its price or adjust its advertising? Should a winning product of a product review (e.g., “Editor’s Choice”) boost its advertising expenditure to spread the good news? How should firms’ strategic responses to product reviews differ across different types of product reviews (description vs. recommendation) and different advertising media (the reviewer’s publication vs. other media)? A theory is developed to address these issues and derive firms’ optimal responses to product reviews under different product/market/review/media conditions. An empirical study based on data collected from several industries support the theoretical findings.
Area 2: Advance Selling
Another important impact of new information technology concerns advance selling strategy for service (selling before the time of service delivery). Until recently, technological limitations restricted the advance selling practice mainly to travel and entertainment related industries (e.g., airlines, hotels, theater tickets). Most advance-selling research focused on the airline industry (e.g., Yield Management), which has specific characteristics such as the negative correlation between consumers’ arrival time and their price sensitivity (e.g., leisure travelers come early but business travelers come late) and capacity constraints. The emergence of new technologies such as personalized bar-coded tickets, biometric palm readers, smart cards, and web-based transactions have dramatically reduced transaction costs of advance selling and given sellers more control over arbitrage (i.e., middleman reselling) which had previously discouraged sellers in many industries from implementing advance selling. Recent studies (Xie and Shugan 2001, Shugan and Xie 2004, 2005) show that advance selling is a far more general marketing tool than previously thought. We show that the profit advantage of advance selling does not require these industry-specific characteristics but only requires the existence of buyer uncertainty about future valuations. This finding is important because buyers are nearly always uncertain about their future valuations for services (e.g., the utility of next year’s vacation or a future college education), and because profits gained by adopting advance selling are not necessarily at the expense of consumers. Our theory shows when and how to advance sell in a variety of market situations, as well as what the optimal price and capacity allocation are for advance and spot periods. Our findings provide precise guidelines for a large number of service providers for whom advance selling provides a creative pricing strategy that can potentially provide substantial improvements in profits.
Area 3: Network Effects and Standards Competition
Finally, with the rapid development of information technology and the digital revolution, network effects and technological standards have an increasingly important effect on the success of many new products/services, including computers, electronic video games, wireless communication, home networking, video/audio electronics, banking services, and online music. Network effects and standards competition impose unique challenges to both firms and consumers. Sun, Xie, and Cao (2004) examines under what conditions an innovating firm should keep its technology proprietary, license its competitors, create a line of compatible products, or simultaneously license its technology and extends its product line. Wang and Xie (2005) empirically test how the patterns of competition between innovating and imitating firms change over product life circle in the presence of network effects. Chen and Xie (2005) study firms’ strategy in markets with a cross-market network effect (e.g., newspaper publishing, media, software), in which a seller sells both a primary and a secondary product (e.g., a newspaper publisher sells newspapers to readers and advertising space to advertisers), and the value of the secondary product depends on the size of the user base of the primary product. Chakravarti and Xie (2005) examine how standards competition affects consumer new product adoption decisions and the effectiveness of various advertising formats when firms face competing technological standards.
【主讲人简介】
Jinhong Xie is Associate Professor of Marketing at the Warrington College of Business Administration, University of Florida, and Visiting Associate Professor at the Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University. She also taught at the William E. Simon Graduate School of Business Administration, University of Rochester, and The International University of Japan. She holds a B. Eng. from Tsinghua University, an M.S. from the Second Academy of the Ministry of Astronautics (China), and an M.S. and a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University.
Professor Xie’s research interests include innovation strategy, network effects and standards competition, economics of service, independent product information, and new product development, forecasting, and pricing. Her theoretical research on advance-selling received John D. C. Little Best Paper Award [for the best marketing paper published in Marketing Science or Management Science]. Her empirical research on new product development won the Research Competition Award from the Product Development and Management Association and the Marketing Science Institute. Her research has been published in Marketing Science, Management Science, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Product Innovation Management, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Service Research, California Management Review, Journal of International Marketing, and IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management. Currently, she is Associate Editor of Management Science, and Area Editor of Marketing Science. |
