Report R2.23 Research in Marketing: Ensuring New Product Success Seminar Leader: Jaydeep Mukherjee jmukherjee[at]mdi.ac.in The issues involved in the evolution of the seminar leader’s on-going doctoral study on "commercially successful product innovation process in emerging markets" were examined. Emerging markets are characterized by incomplete regulatory mechanisms, inadequate distributional structures and the absence of institutional support for consumer protection. There is tremendous income disparity and socio-cultural diversity in such markets leading to largely unpredictable consumer buying behavior. Due to factors such as globalization, and rapid growth of technology, product life cycles have shortened, making new product innovation a core process that needs to be sustained continually. The seminar leader proposed a framework for this process in context of emerging markets and identified five key challenges. These were: strategic challenge, development challenge, production challenge, commercial challenge, and marketing challenge. These were examined in the context of project, company and industry level systems that facilitated new product introduction process and how they interfaced. The researcher realized that a comprehensive study of the whole process was beyond the scope of a doctoral level study. Moreover, it was also found that most existing frameworks did not focus on the success of the product. These factors prompted the researcher to take up the "marketing challenge" of the new product introduction process and study how commercial success of innovative new products could be ensured. This choice was also the result of a need to place the work and the researcher in a particular functional area and marketing was a natural choice considering prior work-experience in the area. Consumers typically face risk and uncertainty in adopting a new product. One way to reduce the risk involved in the adoption of a new product is by seeking more information about the product. However, a sufficient level of information is often difficult to obtain and consumers fall back on other mechanisms to bridge this gap. Based on a review of literature in psychology the researcher found that trust was a key device that people employed in reducing risk and uncertainty. Extending this to the area of marketing, he proposed that "trust" was one of the central mechanisms involved in consumer adoption of new products. Consumer trust typically results from a combination of marketing inputs, direct experiences and indirect experiences. These can either be related to the product in question or the marketer of the product. The presence of the above factors can vary depending on whether a product is the result of a radical innovation in which case the consumer would not have any direct experience of the product or incremental innovation where the product is not absolutely new to the consumer. The same applies for new players in the market and new products by established firms. It was pointed out that the study could adopt different approaches to study the nature of the relationship between trust and new product adoption. The seminar leader chose to embrace a study through the use of variables and sought to answer questions such as: What are the variables involved? Can these variables be measured? What are the best measures that could be used? How valid and reliable are these measures? After an extensive review of literature, the researcher decided that the inquiry would focus on the effect of marketing inputs (independent variable) on purchase intention (dependent variable). Consumer trust on the new product offer was deemed to be the intervening variable in this chain and purchase intention was taken as the best estimator of actual purchase behaviour. It was pointed out that this chain could also be considered as part of a network of variables. This approach might be more useful in examining interrelationships where causation is not clear and one cannot employ categorizations such as dependent, independent and intervening variables. The seminar leader presented a tentative questionnaire prepared for the study and this led to discussions regarding how questionnaires serve as devices for interaction between the researcher and the respondents. Often this is a single stage process. The possibility of expanding this as a multistage process where the researcher can develop a stable relationship with the respondent was explored. It was also pointed out how researchers typically ignore certain "defective responses" obtained through questionnaires. However, such responses might point to shortcomings in the design of the questionnaire or to the insufficiency of the questionnaire method itself to study the problem at hand. Reported by Jacob D. Vakkayil, with inputs from Jaydeep Mukherjee. Copyleft Xavier Institute of Management, Xavier Square, Bhubaneswar 751013, India Research World (ISSN 0974-2379) http://www1.ximb.ac.in/RW.nsf/pages/Home |
