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This paper aims to investigate how the current size and structure of a branded product portfolio impacts new product performance for fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG), testing the long-standing proposition that extending a firm’s brand and product portfolio too far is a dangerous proposition that may damage the market performance of the firm’s new product launches.

Aspects associated with brand size and structure that may impact new product performance are operationalized along two key dimensions: within-category (scale) and cross-category (scope). The impact of the brand’s scale and scope on the sales performance of newly commercialized products by the brand is empirically investigated in the context of FMCG. Over 2,000 new products launched in 2009 and 2010 across 31 food and non-food FMCG product categories in the USA are included in the regression-based analysis.

The authors find strong evidence that brands with broader within-category scale and cross-category scope overall are associated with more successful new product introductions, and that these influences generally are driven more by increased product trial than by repeat or persistence. The authors argue that the higher new product performance observed for more established and proliferated brands may be attributed to advantages of firm product development abilities and product acceptance by the marketplace.

The current results serve to temper the strong cautions set forth in much of the marketing literature about the dangers of overextending the firm’s brand and product portfolio. These results also suggest that future research should be conducted to further understand more nuanced implications of how best to grow the scale and scope of the firm’s brand and product portfolio.

This article explores how the commentary of intermediaries – third-party entities that do not have direct economic stakes in the sales of goods – can contribute to the creation of new market categories comprising preexisting but neglected and undervalued goods. Specifically, I study how the Sundance Institute facilitated the creation of a market for independent cinema in the United States, suggesting that intermediaries create market categories by defining boundaries, generating criteria of evaluation, and setting standards for measuring and establishing hierarchies of quality, which help audiences understand and value the category. The study, thus, adds nuance to our understanding of markets and categories.

Organizational scholars increasingly appreciate the role of categories as bases of order or “cognitive infrastructures” in markets. Yet they construe categories as disciplinary devices. They understand category formation, implementation, and revision as the purview of professionals. And they tie those processes to notions of institutional development that sharply distinguish settled from unsettled or disordered eras. We challenge these conceptions through a historical study of how manufacturers, associations, and cost accountants broke from the disciplinary functions of accounting categories underlying mass production to create new categorical schemes devoted to learning, innovation, and improvement. Reformers reconfigured the uses of categories in markets, mobilizing classifications to spark reflection, experimentation, and improvement among firms by perturbing taken-for-granted assumptions. They also redesigned the practices of producing, implementing, and revising categories. Manufacturers themselves produced and routinely revised classifications through collective deliberation, while accountants served as their consultants, rather than autonomous authorities who monopolized category formation and implementation. In so doing, reformers forged foundations for upgrading markets and fostering competition based on innovation and improvement in a variety of industries. Based on these findings, we extend existing research beyond categorical imperatives to highlight how categories also serve as cognitive infrastructures for learning, discovery, and innovation in markets.

This study aims to explore a new restaurant category’s development from birth to maturity, thereby explaining the rationale for category innovation strategies.

The authors conducted a qualitative case study analysis of the New Chinese-style Fusion Restaurant category’s development from birth to maturity. Thematic analysis was conducted on data collected from semi-structured interviews and textual information.

A new restaurant category’s maturation is determined by the formation of society’s shared knowledge about the category’s crucial attributes, which is an outcome of market participants’ category-related social practices. The authors develop a novel, four-stage framework for the socialized construction of this shared knowledge: a knowledge creation (KC), knowledge diffusion (KD), knowledge integration (KI) and knowledge structuralization (KS). This knowledge evolution along this KC–KD–KI–KS sequence can holistically describe the category maturation process. This framework can help understand the rationale for a restaurant category’s maturation by analyzing the interrelationships among market participants’ social practices, knowledge-related activities and market development.

This study explains how market participants’ knowledge-related activities facilitate a new restaurant category’s maturation. This can help restaurant managers cope with increasingly homogeneous competition by applying a category-innovation strategy.

This study extends product categorization research on restaurants by articulating a product category’s maturation process from a knowledge perspective.

Much of the current literature on category construction and maintenance has focused primarily on the disciplining effect of audiences that evaluate for conformity. This literature often characterizes categories as benign organizing devices that bring order to social life. However, categories are also contentious political and cultural productions. This is especially so, when the categories are hybrid. Employing a qualitative case study of an impact investing organization operating in Sub-Saharan Africa, we illustrate how the construction and maintenance of hybrid categories can have potentially advantageous effects for certain actors by shaping the architecture of knowledge and transferring legitimacy to otherwise illegitimate actors or nascent practices. The findings of this study highlight how some hybrid categories can be used to create and maintain unequal relations of power.

This paper aims to study the consequences of listing national brands in discounters. Is the discount channel a promising outlet for manufacturer brands? Is it an effective means to attract new buyers? Which combination of brand and discount destination at which price is best suited for this strategic move?

Based on a unique dataset (tracking grocery purchase behavior for a representative sample of German households) and employing both descriptive and multivariate statistical techniques, the authors examine the outcome for 134 national brands introduced in six discount chains in Germany between January 2003 and July 2004.

Both the manufacturer and discounter are able to grow their total performance in excess of the market following the introduction for the majority of the brands. Hence, potential cannibalization is more than offset by incremental revenues. It is found that, on average, close to 80 per cent of national brands' sales at a discounter is from new brand buyers. Discounters typically benefit less, as only 29 percent of brand sales are from new category buyers at their store.

Including manufacturer brands into a discount assortment will benefit both the manufacturers and the discounters. Examination of the substantial cross‐brand differences reveals that manufacturers and discounters attract more new customers with brands for which market penetration is still modest. Also, discounters gain more from adding branded offerings in underperforming categories, and benefit from brands that enjoy higher customer loyalty. Finally, national‐brand prices should be set carefully at discounters. It is advised to maintain their price premium even at a discounter.

Discounters are the fastest growing grocery format in Europe. Lately, many discounters add national brands to their private‐label dominated assortment, a move widely discussed in media with substantial implications for grocery channel management. This study provides a comprehensive evaluation of that trend.

This study seeks to explore the value of using brand alliances, or co‐branding strategies, to influence consumer perceptions of new brand extensions under circumstances where the firm (parent brand) introduces new products that will be targeted to product categories within which the parent brand has a low initial degree of perceptual fit.

Data were collected through a four‐stage questionnaire administered to 308 subjects. Hypotheses were explored through a four‐level single factor between subjects experimental design.

Analyses suggest that by partnering with brands possessing higher perceived degrees of fit in the extension category (i.e. co‐brand), parent firms' brands can achieve more favorable positions for their extensions than could be realized if firms acted independently. Explained variance in perceptions of the extension increased substantially when perceptions of co‐ and parent‐brand fit were considered. Fit between the co‐brand and the new extension product apparently should be the driving factor in selecting best partnering brands for alliances. Fit between parent and partner brands may take a back seat when forming alliances.

Current co‐branding research typically addresses the ability of brand alliances to improve perceptions of new products bearing the names of both co‐joined brands. “Perceptual fit” and brand attitudes are major constructs thought to influence the ability of brand alliances to achieve this goal. Specifically, in co‐branding applications, perceptual fit is usually conceptualized as the fit between co‐joined brands themselves, rather than fit between each co‐joined brand and the proposed new product for which both has been combined to launch. The paper's original argument is that when one brand (parent or host brand) seeks to co‐brand for purposes of improving its ability to penetrate an untested new product category, fit should be treated from a more traditional brand extension perspective. This argument is supported.

The purpose of this paper is to integrate literature in the pioneer brand advantage area with the literature on reference prices to examine how reference prices work in a pioneer and follower brand context. There is evidence to suggest that pioneers have a psychological advantage over follower brands, yet how that manifests in terms of reference price effects is not fully understood. The study tests whether the pioneer price and follower price have equal influence on reference prices, or whether the pioneer has a stronger influence.

This research uses a longitudinal experiment to simulate a market of a pioneer brand followed by follower brand, and measures the relative effects of pioneer and follower prices on reference price, value perceptions and purchase intentions. This approach allows greater confidence in the causal nature of the findings.

The results indicate a clear and strong causal effect for the pioneer's price on price and value perceptions of the pioneer and follower, whereas the follower's price only seems to influence perceptions of the follower, not the pioneer. This suggests that consumers overweight the price of the pioneer brand (as exemplar) in the category, and reference price perceptions are systematically biased in its direction. However, these effects were stronger for the more innovative product category being examined. For a less innovative pioneer this effect was not so strong. These findings imply that reference price is brand specific but the more innovative the pioneer brand the more influence it has on reference prices.

These findings are consistent with and extend the literature on pioneer advantage by suggesting that the pioneer can define ideal levels of objective attributes such as price, rather than just defining the ideal attribute combination of subjective, less discernible attributes. This highlights and presents a more complete picture of the natural advantages to product innovation. It also implies the need to consider the multi‐faceted nature of reference price in measurement and research.

A number of studies have examined reference price effects in existing and established product categories. Yet few studies have examined reference price effects in new product categories despite calls in the literature to do so. This study is one of the first studies to examine reference price effects in new product categories and contributes by integrating the literature on pioneer brand advantage with the literature on reference price by examining asymmetric pricing effects between pioneer and follower brands in new product categories.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the heterogeneous effects of gains and losses on the perception of new products. It seeks to argue that the heterogeneity in these effects (partly) stems from the price-perceived quality relationship which is more important for quality-seeking customers.

A multilevel logit model was applied to household panel data on purchases of new yoghurt and sausage products in Germany. The multilevel model allowed to estimate heterogeneous price effects and accounted for the nested structure in panel data.

Significant variation in the effects of gains, losses, and promotions were found. Internal reference prices (IRPs), which served as indicator of loss-averse vs quality-seeking customers, were found to moderate these effects. Monetary losses have less negative effects for customers with high IRPs. Negative interaction effects of IRPs with monetary gains and promotions indicate that quality-seeking customers are less attracted by gains and promotions.

The heterogeneity in the price effects confirms the strategic importance of new product prices to influence customers’ perception of value. The price-quality relationship is an explanatory approach for heterogeneous price effects and should not be neglected in price setting. The inclusion of customer-specific reference price information yields deeper insights into customers’ use of prices to evaluate new products.

This study is the first to estimate asymmetric gain and loss effects in the analysis of new product trial. A customer-specific view in price setting is emphasized by taking customer-specific reference prices into account.

Scholars have primarily focused on how language represents categories. We move beyond this conception to develop a discursive perspective of market categorization focused on how categories are constructed through communicative exchanges. The discursive perspective points to three under-researched mechanisms of category evolution: (1) the interaction between market participants, (2) the power dynamics among market participants and within the discourse, and (3) the cultural and material context in which categories are constructed. In this theoretical paper, we discuss how each of these mechanisms shed light on different phases of category evolution and the methods that could be used to study them.