BEC中级真题阅读精讲:第2辑T4P3 市场准入—先驱者_BEC中级历年考题

BEC中级真题阅读精讲:第2辑T4P3 市场准入—先驱者

Market Entry —The Pioneer

Marc Crystal discusses the be first to market’principle

The timing of market entry is critical to the success of a new product. A company has two alternatives: it can compete to enter a new product market first - otherwise known as pioneering - or it can wait for a competitor to take the lead, and then follow once the market has been established.Despite the limitations of existing research, nobody denies that there are advantages to being a pioneering company. Over the years, there has been a good deal of evidence to show a performance advantage for pioneers.

For many new products, customers are initially unsure about the contribution of product characteristics and features to the products value.Preferences for different characteristics and their desired levels are learned over time. This enables the pioneering company to shape customer preferences in its favour. It sets the standard to which customers refer in evaluating followers products.The pioneering product can become the classic or original product for the whole category, opening up a flood of similar products onto the market, as exemplified by Walkman and Polaroid.

The pioneering product is a bigger novelty when it appears on the market, and is therefore more likely than those that follow to capture customer and distributor attention. In addition, a pioneers advertising is not mixed up with competitors campaigns. Even in the long term, followers must continue to spend more on advertising to achieve the same effect as pioneers. The pioneers can set standards for distribution, occupy the best locations or select the best distributors, which can give them easier access to customers. For example, in many US cities the coffee chain Starbucks, as the first to market, was able to open coffee bars in better known locations than its competitors. In many industrial markets, distributors are not keen to take on second and third products, particularly when the product is technically complex or requires large inventories of spare parts.