Despite the increasing recognition of the importance of word of mouth as an integral component of a firms' marketing efforts, there has been little emphasis on developing suitable guidelines for entrepreneurs who wish to leverage scarce resources by pursuing more innovative marketing techniques....

A simple mathematical model describing the diffusion of a new, infrequently purchased product is proposed. Many previous papers have reported that the differing behaviour of quot;innovatorsquot; and quot;imitatorsquot; is fundamental to the diffusion process. However, previous models have failed...

Forecasting category or industry sales is a vital component of a company's planning and control activities. Sales for most mature durable product categories are dominated by replacement purchases. Previous sales models which explicitly incorporate a component of sales due to replacement assume...

Recent studies of innovation diffusion have investigated cross-country heterogeneity, but implicitly assumed within-country homogeneity. As such, these studies potentially overlook within-country variations in diffusion patterns, which may be even more important to marketing managers and...

Real options valuation (ROV) has recently been proposed as a promising solution to the deficiencies of traditional valuation methods when facing risky technology investments or ventures. Indeed 'real option thinking' - the managerial flexibility to capitalise on opportunities when they arise...

This paper empirically examines models of replacement sales for six electronic consumer durables - TVs, VCRs, DVD players, Digital Cameras, personal and notebook computers - using data from a large survey of 8077 German households. A new replacement model is developed that fits the empirical...

The Product Life Cycle (PLC) concept is a well-known marketing strategy and planning tool. The concept is based on a simple biological analogy of stages over a product's quot;life,quot; which is intuitively appealing, but unfortunately has limited utility in practice. For such a prominent...

Forecasting category or industry sales is a vital component of a company's planning and control activities. Sales for most mature durable product categories are dominated by replacement purchases. Previous sales models which explicitly incorporate a component of sales due to replacement assume...

Firm growth is almost universally portrayed as a good thing, and is commonly used as a measure of success. Applying resource-based reasoning, we argue that growth is often not a sign of sound development. Specifically, we hypothesize that firms which grow without first securing high levels of...