A Comparative Study of Product Launch and Elimination Decisions in UK and US Companies.

The study presented in this article addresses a gap in the product-planning literature, which is the approaches companies use to tackle product launch and elimination decisions. In the prescriptive literature the product launch decision is given as the final stage of the new product development process. Product launch and elimination decisions were investigated with respect to a range of dimensions of decision making in samples of Great Britain and the U.S. companies. The study identified several approaches to tackling these decisions, based on differences in their decision-making behavior. Review of the product planning literature revealed few empirical studies, with the majority of the literature being conceptual contributions. This study also addressed formality in the product elimination process. These conclusions relate directly to the need to study the actual decision on whether or not to eliminate products. The main conclusion was that the organizational contextual variables and external environment variables that were investigated give only a partial explanation of formality within the process.