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The products of some firms emerge neither from new technology developments nor from attempting to address articulated consumers’ needs, but from a company-internal design-driven approach. To explore this design-driven approach, we propose a construct, design orientation, as a firm’s ability to integrate functionality, aesthetics, and meaning in its new products. We hypothesize relationships between a firm’s design orientation, customer orientation, technological orientation, and willingness to cannibalize on its new product performance.

We use data from surveys of senior marketing executives entrusted with design in 252 US firms, we validate the construct of design orientation and establish its distinctiveness from related constructs of creativity, technological orientation, and customer orientation. Using a structural equation modeling approach, we test the hypotheses and find support for them.

Individually, design orientation, technological orientation, and customer orientation improve new product performance. In addition, customer orientation decreases the positive effect of design orientation while willingness to cannibalize increases the positive effect of design orientation on new product performance.

More than two-thirds of respondents (69%) perceive that their firm can improve its new product performance by increasing its design orientation, an overlooked organizational capability.

Although practitioners have acknowledged the importance of design as a strategic marketing issue, there is little in the literature on how firms can benefit from building capabilities in the design domain, the issue we focus on in this research.

We develop a competitive advertising model, where a firm's advertising spending can be divided into two parts. One part, which we call generic advertising, affects only total market demand. The second component of that spending, brand advertising, affects market share directly, but may also have an effect on total market demand. We investigate how the profit margins of the firms, the advertising elasticities, the base market shares of the firms, and the market demand effect of brand advertising interact to determine the total amount of advertising spending in the market, who pays and how they pay (the ratio of generic to brand advertising). We also show that, in general, a market where generic advertising expenditures are set cooperatively will see higher expenditures of generic advertising than will a purely competitive market.

From the supplier firm's perspective, a referral is a recommendation from A (the referrer) to B (the potential customer) that B should, or should not, purchase from C (the supplier firm). Thus, as referrals are for a specific supplier firm, they should be viewed as part of the supplier firm's marketing and sales activities. We recognize three types of referrals – customer-to-potential customer referrals, horizontal referrals, and supplier-initiated referrals – that have critical roles in a potential customer's purchase decision. We develop the concept of referral equity to capture the net effect of all referrals for a supplier firm in the market. We argue that supplier firms should view referral equity as a resource that has financial value to the firm as it affects the firm's cash flows and profits. We offer strategies firms can use to manage referrals and build their referral equity and suggest a research agenda.

Considers how research carried out during trade shows can help industrial firms to manage the new product development process. Discusses the NPD process and offers a scheme for classifying trade fairs, thus making the selection of appropriate events easier for the industrial marketer. Develops recommendations for the conducting of new product research at trade shows and concludes that while not a substitute for traditional NPD research methods due to cost limitations and the different types of attendees present at various events, good opportunities exist for industrial exhibitors to use NPD stages such as idea generation, screening and testing at trade shows rather than concentrating on the commercialization of new products.