Mastering the 'Name your product category' game

• Autores: Fernando F. Suarez, Stine Grodal
• Localización: MIT Sloan management review, ISSN 1532-9194, Vol. 56, Nº 2, 2015, págs. 23-29
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Although Shakespeare claimed that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, over the last five to 10 years, significant research on category labels has shown the opposite to be true. This research finds that a company's labeling strategy can have important performance implications for products in nascent markets. As part of their research in this growing field, the authors followed the more than 200 category labels that smartphone producers used to introduce new products since roughly the beginning of the 21st century. Category labels are a way to identify a product's commonality with others of its type. New industries are characterized by a period of uncertainty in which labels for the product category proliferate. The ideal window of opportunity to enter a new industry begins when a dominant category label is introduced. Companies should consider tracking the evolution of category labels. Knowing when a dominant category label is emerging can give a company valuable information advantages