Seminar (Dept. of General Management)

Title: Product Positioning in Digital Markets: A Demand-Side View

Speaker: Zhao-Ding (Technical University of Munich)

Time: 10:00 (Friday), December 20th, 2024

Venue: Room 1007, Mingde Business Building

Language: Chinese/English

ABSTRACT:

This paper proposes that firms’ product positioning in digital markets includes proposing combinations of product functions—different conceptualizations of how products provide functional uses and add value to customers. As these positions are closely aligned with customer needs and preferences, aggregate market feedback serves as an essential input for positioning strategies in digital markets, especially for the initial entry into the market. We find that while a high level of customer dissatisfaction is associated with greater emphasis on the core function and differentiation from more successful products, high customer evaluation heterogeneity is associated with less emphasis on the core function and imitation of more successful products. Our study contributes to the emerging literature on strategic behaviors in digital markets by showing the drivers of different positioning strategies pursued by the firms and establishing market feed-back as an essential input to innovation in digital product markets. It also contributes more broadly to the literature on market entry by empirically demonstrating the impact of demand-side considerations in market entry decisions.

SHORT BIOGRAPHY:

Prof. Zhao-Ding is a management scholar and her research focuses on understanding firm’s changing beliefs and strategic behaviors in new technologies and nascent markets. She studies how organizations formulate problems and interpret feedback under uncertainty and ambiguity, and how they learn from and adapt to their environments. She examines these questions in a wide range of digital, cultural, and knowledge-intensive industries, and approaches teaching and research in entrepreneurship through the lens of organization theory.

Prof. Zhao-Ding studied at Peking University in China for a bachelor’s degree in Economics and Finance and at Chinese University of Hong Kong for a master’s degree in Global Political Economy. She received her PhD in Management with a specialization in Entrepreneurship from INSEAD, and spent half a year at The Wharton School during her doctoral studies. Since 2020 Prof. Amy was appointed to the Assistant Professorship for Entrepreneurial Management at TUM.