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New product growth in many industries, particularly those involving high technology, is frequently dynamic. it often involves rapid technological substitution by successive generations of a given product category and emerging or changing related product categories (complements or substitutes). These may reduce or expand the focal category's growth or sales potential. Previous marketing studies dealing with product growth have dealt only with substitution effects among successive generation and not with complementarity and substitution provided by related product categories. We develop a dynamic market growth model with treats the leading single category, inter-generational model as a special case. It is able to incorporate inter-product category and technological substitution effects simultaneously. Inputs are simple sales data and outputs include estimates of diffusion coefficients and magnitudes of the effect of each category on the others. The market potential for each category or generation is treated as a variable rather than a parameter. The model is calibrated, its plausibility tested, and its forecasts validated using data on wireless telecommunications services from two Asian markets. Results show that the market potential (and sales growth) of one category or generation is significantly affected by others and by the overall structure of a geographic market. The model is shown to predict relatively well even when the data from recently introduced categories/generations are limited. Plausible managerial implications from the empirical results are emphasized and contributions, limitations, and suggestions for further research are discussed.

This research in two experiments investigates the effectiveness of a composite brand in a brand extension context. A composite brand name combines two existing brands, in different positions as header or modifier, and uses this as the brand name for a new product (e.g., Slim-Fast Chocolate Cakemix by Godiva). The study in Experiment 1 specifically examines the effect of attribute level complementarity between two constituent brands with respect to the following: 1) the manner in which consumers form a concept (i.e., attribute salience and performance levels) of a composite brand extension; 2) the respective roles for each constituent brand in consumers' formations of the composite concept; and 3) whether the composite brand extension is a more viable branding strategy than a direct extension (i.e., Slim-Fast chocolate cakemix) in facilitating favorable reactions to the extension product and in generating positive feeback effects upon the original constituent brands. The study in Experiment 2 explores the impact of attitudinal favorability toward the modifier brand versus attribute level complementarity on the effectiveness of the composite brand extension strategy. The results in both experiments revealed important benefits to the composite brand extension strategy when attribute levels are complementary.

Mathematical programming and heuristic programming have been frequently proposed to compute optimal media plans. While early efforts utilized a linear programming model, it is generally acknowledged that the response or effectiveness function to be maximized is non-linear. It has previously been shown that if the response surface is not well-behaved (i.e., not concave), it is possible for a local optimum found by mathematical programming or a heuristic approach not to be the global optimum. The paper shows that even if the response surface is concave, the existence of media discounts in the budget constraint is sufficient to cause these approaches to locate suboptimal solutions. Thus, additional heuristics are needed which are able to search for schedules that are not 'near' the current proposed schedule. In the final section, it is suggested that the media planning problem might be treated from a different viewpoint by eliminating the budget constraint altogether and working from basic economic principles. (Author)