A consistent pattern observed for really new household consumer durables is a takeoff or dramatic increase in sales early in their history. The takeoff tends to appear as an elbow-shaped discontinuity in the sales curve showing an average sales increase of over 400%. In contrast, most marketing...

Research on the product life cycle (PLC) has focused primarily on the role of diffusion. This study takes a broader theoretical perspective on the PLC by incorporating informational cascades and developing and testing many new hypotheses based on this theory. On average, across 30 product...

We evaluate whether stock prices can predict the sales takeoff and the long-term survival of firms at takeoff. We find that abnormal returns are strongly positive in the year prior to takeoff, thus suggesting an important signal of the takeoff. Moreover, we find that negative abnormal returns in...

New products have been a key focus of research in marketing for decades. As such, there is a huge literature associated with (and numerous books on) the subject, which makes it impossible to provide a comprehensive treatment in this short chapter. To provide some focus, this chapter concentrates...