استراتژی های ارتباطات بازاریابی در حمایت از راه اندازی محصول: مطالعه تجربی از شرکتهای تایوانی با تکنولوژی بالا

To understand the mechanisms that underlie marketing communication support for product launches, the authors conduct an empirical study and propose a conceptual framework that depicts the relationships between informational/transformational or elaborational/relational messages and their effectiveness. The hypothesized message–communication and message–sales effect links are moderated by three communication process characteristics: message clarity, message uniformity, and integration of the communication. On the basis of data collected from an industrial survey of 101 high-tech firms in Taiwan, the authors find that informational and relational messages offer greater support for new products. Whereas message clarity and integration of communication expectedly demonstrate positive moderating effects on message–performance links, message uniformity only affects messages–sales effect relationships. The authors explore research insights and discuss implications for both academia and practitioners from the perspectives of new product management and integrated marketing communications.

Product launch is perhaps the most expensive, risky, and poorly managed phase of new product development process, in the sense that firms must commit enormous time, financial, and managerial resources, and the average failure rate is as high as 40% for consumer and industrial new products (Hultink, Hart, Robben, & Griffin, 2000) and more than 60% in high-tech industries (Goldenberg, Lehmann, & Mazursky, 2001). Despite the risks inherent in commercialization, launch efforts often are decisive in securing new product success (Crawford and Di Benedetto, 2003 and Guiltinan, 1999). In this challenging context, a firm that is proficient in communicating the positioning of its new products and leveraging its affiliated brands may maximize its chances of achieving profitable product acceptance in the target market (Guiltinan, 1999). Launch planning involves both strategic and tactical decisions (Biggadike, 1979). Whereas the former entails details such as product innovation, market targeting, and market leadership, the latter pertains to choosing marketing mix elements, of which marketing communications represents the central concern (Guiltinan, 1999). In the launch process, marketing communications refer to all of the information and attitude efforts expended to influence product adoption, including product attribute expressions and strong persuasion attempts (Crawford & Di Benedetto, 2003). Existing literature clearly supports the positive relationship between effective marketing communications and new product success (e.g., Cooper and Kleinschmidt, 1994 and Song and Parry, 1994). However, high-tech industries are unique in the great uncertainties that derive from their market, technology, and competitive factors (Mohr, 2001 and Moriarty and Kosnik, 1989). In such industries, market offerings generally are founded on significant amounts of scientific and technical know-how (John, Weiss, & Dutta, 1999). These unique industry characteristics result in different information processing patterns among buyers (Capon and Glazer, 1987 and Glazer, 1991), which require adaptive marketing strategies and tools (Rangan and Bartus, 1995 and Shanklin and Ryans, 1987). In response to such environmental complexity and turbulence, high-tech marketers may use marketing communications to build strong brand names (Morris, 1996) and assuage customers' fear and doubt involved in product adoption (Lee & O'Connor, 2003). From both theoretical and practical perspectives, it is worth studying what makes marketing communications that introduce new products effective, especially in high-tech industries. For example, Taiwanese high-tech firms previously based their business models on original equipment manufacturing (OEM), but OEM firms have suffered drastic profitability losses as a result of strong competition from companies located in other countries with lower labor costs. To escape this quandary, several firms, including Acer, Asus, and BenQ, began to recognize the importance of their own brands and switched their investments and endeavors toward high value-added activities such as research and development, product innovation, and brand building. Those firms that switched their business focus thus needed to engage in different marketing communications than they had used in the past. That is, unlike marketers of consumer products, which mainly rely on mass media communications (Hultink et al., 2000), firms specializing OEM businesses behave more like industrial product manufacturers, which usually communicate product-related information to buyers through personal selling or trade shows. For Taiwanese high-tech firms, the marketing communication decision has become far more complicated, because they essentially function in both business and consumer markets. Therefore, an investigation of the marketing communications used to launch products in Taiwan's high-tech industries may offer interesting and significant insights into various launch-supporting communication behaviors across product categories and markets. This research attempts to find a normative model to guide high-tech firms to effective marketing communications in support of their product launches. Specifically, we aim to achieve two related objectives: (1) determining which message content is most effective in introducing new high-tech products and (2) understanding how to manage the communication process to achieve greater effectiveness. These distinct objectives are both legitimate, in that what to say and how to say it are equally important in any type of communications. We also propose a conceptual framework, illustrated in Fig. 1, to depict the relationships among three components related to marketing communications for product launch: message content, communication process characteristics, and effectiveness. Message content consists of two dimensions: informational/transformational (Aaker and Norris, 1982, Aaker and Stayman, 1992, MacInnis and Stayman, 1993 and Puto and Wells, 1984) and elaborational/relational (Bridges, Keller, & Sood, 2000). Our framework proposes that various types of message content impose different effects on the performance of launched products, which we capture with communication and sales effects. The message content–effectiveness links furthermore are moderated by three characteristics of the marketing communication process: message clarity, message uniformity, and integration of communication. Our theoretical foundation for this model stems from exchange theory's model of interpersonal communications (Gatignon & Robertson, 1986) and integrated marketing communications (IMC), which advocates the alignment of communications to deliver a flow of consistent messages about a product or service to meet a common set of communication objectives or support a single positioning (Percy, 1997 and Pickton and Broderick, 2001). Briefly, the moderation works as a result of the communication efficiency or synergy created by messages that are coordinated throughout the communication process. In examining the hypothesized relationships, we hope to shed some light on the mechanism by which IMC should provide greater message delivery capabilities.

Our research shows that in high-tech industries, what to say and how to say it are both essential for marketing communications designed to support a product launch. We explore the strategies for designing messages (i.e., what to say) according to informational/transformational and elaborational/relational dimensions and propose that high-tech customers, who are relatively motivated and able to process new product-related information easily, may be better swayed by informational messages, which increase their awareness of, interest in, and comprehension of new products and lead to their adoption of the product. That is, the use of informational messages is more effective for launching high-tech products than is the use of transformational messages. Moreover, it is beneficial to use relational messages, which emphasize the association of the new product with its parent brand, than elaborational messages, because the high speed of product innovation in high-tech industries increases customers' perceived adoption risks associated with product obsolescence or network externality. Marketers can overcome adoption resistance by delivering messages that link products to their parent brands, which, if they possess strong brand equity, can generate customer trust and confidence in the new products. These aforementioned findings have managerial implications for designing new product-related messages. The messages communicated to facilitate product launch should balance informational and relational elements, and the firm should make its informational and relational messages complementary, not mutually exclusive. Performance represents the price of admission in high-tech markets, so many high-tech companies promise value on the basis of cutting-edge products and superior service and support (Ward et al., 1999), which causes consumers of new high-tech products to consider them full of perceived and cognitive risks and resist their adoption (Lee & O'Connor, 2003). It is therefore critical that marketers use appropriate message strategies to reduce such risks and increase product adoption. High-tech firms also should give priority to branding and brand-building programs. Keller (1998) indicates that the short product life cycle of high-tech products places a premium on corporate or family brands with strong credibility associations. When it comes to brand strategy, a high-tech firm is less likely to brand its new products with totally new names; rapid product obsolescence would make it costly for the firm to do so and difficult for customers to develop product or brand loyalty. Corporate and product family names thus serve as naming platforms, to which modifiers are attached to name new product versions—Windows 2000, or Microsoft Word, Microsoft Works, Microsoft Explorer, and so forth (Ryder, 1994 and Shipley and Howard, 1993). For example, the successful “Intel Inside” campaign has led end users to generate favorable associations with Intel's corporate brand. Likewise, Cisco Systems has leveraged its success in the behind-the-scenes business market into the growing consumer network market through its television commercials. Brand-building efforts also emerge from companies like Nokia, Qualcomm, and Oracle, which have started to use mass media to reach broader customer markets to establish and nurture their corporate or brand identities (Mohr, 2001). Managers must bear in mind that the quality of the communication process, given effective message content, is critical to new product success. Clear messages influence receivers' cognitive efficiency so they may accurately perceive and respond to the communication. The effectiveness of launch-related marketing communications, in terms of communication or sales effects, therefore can be improved. Our research reveals that the extent to which marketing communications are integrated is critical to the effectiveness of a message strategy; thus, synergy will heighten the impact of specific marketing communications. Surprisingly, message uniformity fails to impose any impact on the message–communication relationship, but it does positively moderate the sales effect—possibly because receivers perceive a series of messages as uniform only in the late stages of cognition, close to their adoption decision. High technological uncertainty, a salient characteristic of high-tech industries, may lengthen the customer's cognition process and diminish the moderating effects of consistent messages. However, marketing communications may be enhanced by accelerating customer perceptions of messages as uniform during earlier cognition stages. Overall, messages must communicate in such a clear, uniform, and integrated manner that the target audience responds or reacts just as marketers expected. For effective communication to occur, messages should fit the cognitive capability of the target audience and be delivered through coordinated, integrated marketing communications (Fill, 2001). Our findings also have important implications for high-tech firms in emerging economies like Taiwan. Most Taiwanese high-tech firms are involved in OEM, though some have been trying to change their business model into original design manufacturing or original brand manufacturing. We find that new product success hinges on the successful planning and execution of supportive marketing communications that focus messages not only on product attributes but also branding. Taiwanese high-tech firms, which possess great expertise in R&D and engineering, must start learning how to build their own brands and implement essential marketing communications to promote their brands and affiliated products if they want to increase their value for customers and themselves.