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Accurately identifying key competitors across multiple product lines is essential for enhancing the flexibility and competitiveness of product strategies. This study introduces a novel data-driven model for competitive analysis termed the Product Competition Analysis Model based on Consumer Preference Satisfaction Similarity (PCAM-CPSS). Unlike traditional methods that rely on assessments of the competitive environment, the PCAM-CPSS leverages sentiment analysis of user-generated content (UGC) to quantify consumer preference satisfaction. This method constructs a network based on product satisfaction similarity to map competitive relationships and employs a community detection algorithm to identify key competitors. To assess the model’s efficacy, we collected and analyzed user reviews of various smartphone brands to serve as an evaluation dataset. We compared the performance of the PCAM-CPSS against two mainstream competitive analysis methods: attribute similarity-based ratings and co-occurrence statistics. The results, evaluated using the Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (NDCG) index, demonstrate that the PCAM-CPSS, particularly with price adjustment, offers significant advantages in identifying competitors more accurately than other evaluated methods.

Building a complex portfolio of products can be beneficial for young firms due to increased sales growth and competitiveness. Yet, the benefits from product portfolio complexity (PPC) are often outweighed by rising costs, leading to an inverted U-shaped relationship between PPC and performance. Recent research has called for an increased understanding of how firms are able to better manage higher levels of PPC. We suggest that absorptive capacity and ambidexterity are vital to enhancing the benefits and mitigating the costs of increasing PPC. Using a sample of 215 young high technology firms, we find support for positive moderating effects of absorptive capacity and ambidexterity on the inverted U-shaped relationship between PPC and firm performance.

We study a market model in which competing firms use costly marketing devices to influence the set of alternatives which consumers perceive as relevant. Consumers in our model are boundedly rational in the sense that they have an imperfect perception of what is relevant to their decision problem. They apply well-defined preferences to a \"consideration set\", which is a function of the marketing devices employed by the firms. We examine the implications of this behavioural model in the context of a competitive market model, particularly on industry profits, vertical product differentiation, the use of marketing devices, and consumers' conversion rates.

Nearly a quarter of all products purchased in U.S. supermarkets and drug stores are store brands (SBs). Although the presence of SBs benefits both consumers and retailers, it is a threat to the dominance of the incumbent national brand manufacturers (NBMs). When considering the potential threat of an SB, an NBM generally pursues one of three strategies: accommodate, displace, or buffer. Under the accommodation strategy, the NBM repositions the products in his existing product line. Under the displacement strategy, the NBM elects to supply the SB to preempt the entry of the SB supplier. Under the buffering strategy, the NBM adds a defender product, which competes with his own product offering and the new SB. Using a game-theoretic model, we consider a market where consumers are heterogeneous in their valuation of product quality and analyze an NBM's response to an SB threat. We focus on two important drivers: the NBM's ability to differentiate on the quality dimensions and his cost advantage over the outside supplier of SB. To completely characterize the NBM's response, we consider two regimes. In the first regime, the NBM is a monopolist producer. In the second regime, the retailer has the added option of procuring an SB product from an independent, nonstrategic SB manufacturer. By comparing the results from both regimes, we develop a descriptive theory that clarifies the incentives of the NBM to accommodate, displace, or buffer. In doing this, we determine how the NBM's whole product portfolio should be designed, i.e., the positioning (quality levels) and prices of all its offerings.

Value chain–based approaches offer tremendous scope for market-based improvements in production, productivity, rural economy diversification, and household incomes, but are often covered by literature that is too conceptual or heavily focused on analysis. This has created a gap in the information available to planners, practitioners, and value chain participants. Furthermore, few references are available on how these approaches can be applied specifically to developing agriculture in Africa. 'Building Competitiveness in Africa's Agriculture: A Guide to Value Chain Concepts and Applications' describes practical implementation approaches and illustrates them with scores of real African agribusiness case studies. Using these examples, the 'Guide' presents a range of concepts, analytical tools, and methodologies centered on the value chain that can be used to design, implement, and evaluate agricultural and agribusiness development initiatives. It stresses principles of market focus, collaboration, information sharing, and innovation. The 'Guide' begins by examining core concepts and issues related to value chains. A brief literature review then focuses on five topics of particular relevance to African agricultural value chains. These topics address challenges faced by value chain participants and practitioners that resonate through the many cases described in the book. The core of the book presents methodological tools and approaches that blend important value chain concepts with the topics and with sound business principles. The tools and case studies have been selected for their usefulness in supporting market-driven, private-sector initiatives to improve value chains. The 'Guide' offers 13 implementation approaches, presented within the implementation cycle of a value chain program, followed by descriptions of actual cases. Roughly 60 percent of the examples are from Africa, while the rest come from Europe, Latin America, and Asia. The 'Guide' offers useful guidance to businesspeople, policy makers, representatives of farmer or trade organizations, and others who are engaged in agro-enterprise and agribusiness development. These readers will learn how to use value chain approaches in ways that can contribute to sound operational decisions, improved market linkage, and better results for enterprise and industry development.

Purpose - The purpose of this article is to investigate the influences of green product innovation and product process innovation on two constructs of green innovation casual chain: green product competitive advantage and green new product success. The impacts of green product competitive advantage as a partial mediator in the link between green product/process innovations and green new product success are also examined. Design/methodology/approach - A model with four constructs is presented and tested on a sample of 203 R&D project leaders of electronics firms operating in China using quantitative methods. Findings - It is found that green product and process innovations are positively associated with green product competitive advantage and green new product success, and green product competitive advantage partially mediates the relationships between green product/process innovations and green new product success. It is also found that green product innovation exerts a stronger influence on the consequential constructs than green process innovation. Practical implications - The positive causalities among the constructs suggest that green innovation is more than a branding support. It pays to pursue green innovation. Green product innovation is demonstrated to have a positively stronger influence on both green product competitive advantage and green new product success than green process innovation. The difference in impact signals that when operating under limited resources, green product innovation should be pursued first. Originality/value - The article addresses the gap in green innovation theory concerning the associations among the key constructs of green innovation causal chain. It is the first green innovation research ever conducted in the e-industry in China. The causalities identified can be leveraged to improve Chinese e-industry players' innovative and competitive capabilities and to encourage them to stay proactive in addressing challenges arising from environmental issues.

In contemporary urban contexts, retail establishments have emerged as essential components of city life, engaging in fierce competition to capture consumer attention and augment their financial gains. Implementing a price promotion strategy is essential for efficaciously appealing customers. Nonetheless, the complex interaction between consumer preferences and product attributes, particularly in environments characterized by competitive product offerings, complicates the development of effective promotional strategies. This paper aims to present an agent-based simulation model for capturing the results of strategic approaches for retails offering competitive products, thereby sidestepping the need for empirical testing or data collection in real-world settings. In this model, consumer decision-making processes are initially influenced by two primary factors: the effectiveness of advertising and the impact of word-of-mouth communication. Subsequent decisions are then depending on the degree of price reduction encountered in-store. The simulation assesses various promotional tactics, examining the depth of price reductions, the frequency and timing of promotions, and the resultant impact on store profitability. The outcomes reveal that distinct strategies yield varying levels of effectiveness depending on the price elasticity of products. Moreover, non-overlapping promotional happenings yield superior profit margins as compared to concurrent promotions. The insights garnered from this study are anticipated to provide helpful guidance for future strategic planning for retails.

This study attempts to answer a basic customer management dilemma facing firms: when should the firm use behavior-based pricing (BBP) to discriminate between its own and competitors' customers in a competitive market? If BBP is profitable, when should the firm offer a lower price to its own customers rather than to the competitor's customers? This analysis considers two features of customer behavior up to now ignored in BBP literature: heterogeneity in customer value and changing preference (i.e., customer preferences are correlated but not fixed over time). In a model where both consumers and competing firms are forward-looking, we identify conditions when it is optimal to reward the firm's own or competitor's customers and when BBP increases or decreases profits. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to identify conditions in which (1) it is optimal to reward one's own customers under symmetric competition and (2) BBP can increase profits with fully strategic and forward-looking consumers.

Customers develop switching costs when they invest time and effort to develop capabilities required to optimally use a given product. Such capabilities are likely to be firm specific and cannot be transferred perfectly to competitors' product offerings. Customers who face switching costs are likely to remain with the same firm and consume complementary products that meet their needs. Thus, firms can achieve competitive advantage by exploiting customers' switching costs. In this paper, we hypothesize that the extent to which firms can benefit from customers' switching costs is contingent upon the firms' internal cross-selling capabilities. We use online banking data to test our hypotheses and find that customers' switching costs contribute to banks' profitability only in the presence of high levels of internal cross-selling capabilities.