PDMA 2006 Research Forum - 10-22-06 Morning (Track 2)

Emphasizing customer advantage or competitor advantage (Rijsdijk, Langerak, Hultink)
Hypothesis: customer-oriented firms place a high priority on the creation of customer value. Whereas, competitor-centered firms have unstable strategies. A competitor-orientation results in products that are similar to existing products.

The study (maybe read the write-up if you’re interested) recommends when to emphasize benefit statements that are superiority-oriented vs. advantage-oriented. The difference? Both express a benefit, but a superiority-oriented benefit statement explains how the product is better than a competitor, rather than how the product solves the user’s core problem.

This survey looked at about 140 data points, and I was told by another researcher that it was a low response rate, but don’t take my word for it.

Information Search Strategies, Market Knowledge Dimensions, and NPD performance (Atuahene-Gima, Toilo, Luca)
These researchers wanted to determine how market knowledge search strategies impact NPD performance.

Market Knowledge = Customer Knowledge + Competitor Knowledge

Among knowledge acquisition process, information search is the “most consciously pursued by mangers on a day-to-day basis” (Huber 1991, p. 97)

Firms vary in the degree to which they search in the domain of their prior knowledge (local search) and/or in new domains (distal search)

Distal search and local search are not two ends of a continuum.

Functional learning occurs within communities of practice which specializes around specific problem solving activities.

They surveyed 750 high-tech firms in China.

Conclusions:

Local search is the stronger antecedent of both depth and breadth of market knowledge.

Distal search leads to market knowledge breadth but not to market knowledge depth.

Broad market knowledge needs to be complemented by broad technology knowledge.