Procter & Gamble has operated nearly 300 branded products and outsold in more than 140 nations worldwide these days. Among these products, P&G has its innovative research and developes abilities to introduce the brand new infant merchandise ¡V Pampers diapers. P&G is usually not a first mover but Pampers is the state of art product for little infants in the globe. Soon after Pampers¡¦ existence, this unique product has benefited countless mothers to nourish their little ones. In many years, Pampers has played the pioneer character and its leadership in the baby diapers market. Thus, this research study will be focused on P&G¡¦s product, Pampers, to discover P&G¡¦s first mover advantages. In the meantime, this paper will also study how much advantage first mover has in the consumer products industry, where these advantages come from, and how to maintain them. In addition, this research study will examine other unique competitiveness in Taiwan¡¦s diapers¡¦ market for infants. This research study has discovered that Pampers has several first mover advantages and they are as follows: 1. The sequence of entering a market is not necessary related to the market shares but a brand has the most effectiveness when it first enters the market 2. When this particular industry has low competiveness but high entering barriers, or when a specific product lifecycle is in the introduction stage or growing stage, the first mover has more advantages when entering this market 3. The entering sequence has effectiveness to the price elasticity, production cost, and advertisement cost. The marketing combination has higher effectiveness in the long turn market 4. In the high penetration market, the first mover has more powerful competitive advantages 5. The marketing abilities will enhance first mover¡¦s brand equity

Despite the fact that most firms are late entrants in any product market, research on how to achieve a late-mover advantage is limited and lags behind the theoretical work on first-mover advantage. The strategic choice a late mover can utilize to compete against the pioneer is largely underdeveloped. Further, extant studies provide contradictory arguments and predictions regarding the efficacy of two basic late entry strategies: an enhancing strategy (providing a late entrant with enhanced features along existing product attributes) and a distinctive strategy (adding new or unique features to a late entrant' offering). The goal of this dissertation is to better understand the underlying behavioral mechanisms that enable a late entrant to compete with a successful pioneer and thereby address this inconsistency in the literature. Taking a category-based learning perspective, it is proposed that new brands are learned through a comparison process with existing brands. In the process, common features are evaluated in a category-based mode while unique features are processed in a piecemeal fashion. Two behavioral mechanisms are identified — discrepancy effects (i.e., perceived differentiation) which add to the late entrant's visibility and attractiveness, and ambiguity effects (comparison difficulty and perceived performance risk) that lessen the late entrant's attractiveness. Product category familiarity is proposed as the key moderator that affects the salience of each behavioral mechanism and hence the effectiveness of late entry strategies. Three experiments were designed to test the proposed perspective. It was found that common features are the focus of comparison in unfamiliar product classes and unique features receive particular attention in familiar product classes. Accordingly, ambiguity effects become more salient in unfamiliar product categories while differentiation effects are more prominent in familiar product cases. Further, a distinctive strategy is both more differentiated and more ambiguous than an enhancing strategy. Thus, a distinctive strategy is more effective in a familiar product class due to its attention-grabbing nature. An enhancing strategy is more successful in a novel or unfamiliar product class because of low levels of ambiguity. These findings provide important implications for product entry and positioning strategies as well as for further research. / Ph. D.

Quality of a prescription drug is uncertain to patients, physicians and even the manufacturer of the drug. Because this uncertainty can deter physicians from prescribing the drug, it is important to investigate how various marketing communication activities help reveal the true quality of its product. In particular, this study investigates publicity and advertising under quality uncertainty. Chapter 1 studies the effect of publicity on consumer demand with a reduced form approach. Chapter 2 structurally investigates the roles of detailing and publicity when the information spill-over is present. Both chapters study the market of anti-cholesterol drugs (statins). Chapter 1 investigates the effects of publicity (media coverage) on consumer demand. The main obstacle to measuring the impact of publicity is that data on media coverage are difficult to interpret. To overcome this obstacle, we propose a new way to code information presented in news articles, mapping the information to a multi-dimensional attribute space. We combine our publicity data with data on sales, detailing, medical journal advertising, direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA) and landmark clinical trial outcomes, and estimate a demand model. Our results suggest that not all forms of publicity are equal. In chapter 2, we study consumer learning about scientific evidence and its impact on demand for pharmaceutical products by using the Bayesian learning model. Unlike previous literature, our learning model allows consumer’s prior quality perceptions to be correlated across brands. This unique feature of the model allows us to investigate information spill-over effects across brands. The information spill-over allows late entrants to free-ride on first movers’ investment in clinical trials and marketing activities and to gain late mover advantage. In addition to using product level market share data, we supplement them with switching rates and discontinuing rates. The switching rate data are particularly useful for taking the presence of switching costs into consideration, which has been ignored in the literature using product-level data. Our estimated structural model has implications for managers in allocating resources to various types of marketing activities more efficiently and helps forecast returns of clinical trials that are sponsored by pharmaceutical firms.

Quality of a prescription drug is uncertain to patients, physicians and even the manufacturer of the drug. Because this uncertainty can deter physicians from prescribing the drug, it is important to investigate how various marketing communication activities help reveal the true quality of its product. In particular, this study investigates publicity and advertising under quality uncertainty. Chapter 1 studies the effect of publicity on consumer demand with a reduced form approach. Chapter 2 structurally investigates the roles of detailing and publicity when the information spill-over is present. Both chapters study the market of anti-cholesterol drugs (statins). Chapter 1 investigates the effects of publicity (media coverage) on consumer demand. The main obstacle to measuring the impact of publicity is that data on media coverage are difficult to interpret. To overcome this obstacle, we propose a new way to code information presented in news articles, mapping the information to a multi-dimensional attribute space. We combine our publicity data with data on sales, detailing, medical journal advertising, direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA) and landmark clinical trial outcomes, and estimate a demand model. Our results suggest that not all forms of publicity are equal. In chapter 2, we study consumer learning about scientific evidence and its impact on demand for pharmaceutical products by using the Bayesian learning model. Unlike previous literature, our learning model allows consumer’s prior quality perceptions to be correlated across brands. This unique feature of the model allows us to investigate information spill-over effects across brands. The information spill-over allows late entrants to free-ride on first movers’ investment in clinical trials and marketing activities and to gain late mover advantage. In addition to using product level market share data, we supplement them with switching rates and discontinuing rates. The switching rate data are particularly useful for taking the presence of switching costs into consideration, which has been ignored in the literature using product-level data. Our estimated structural model has implications for managers in allocating resources to various types of marketing activities more efficiently and helps forecast returns of clinical trials that are sponsored by pharmaceutical firms.