Product differentiation

In economics and marketing, product differentiation (or simply differentiation) is the process of distinguishing a product or service from others to make it more attractive to a particular target market. This involves differentiating it from competitors' products as well as from a firm's other products. The concept was proposed by Edward Chamberlin in his 1933 book, The Theory of Monopolistic Competition. Rationale Firms have different resource endowments that enable them to construct specific competitive advantages over competitors. Resource endowments allow firms to be different, which reduces competition and makes it possible to reach new segments of the market. Thus, differentiation is the process of distinguishing the differences of a product or offering from others, to make it more attractive to a particular target market. Although research in a niche market may result in changing a product in order to improve differentiation, the changes themselves are not differe

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Joint product assortment, inventory and price optimization to attract loyal and non-loyal customers

Argyro Katsifou, Ralf Seifert, Jean-Sébastien Tancrez

In this paper, we analyze the emerging retail practice of carrying a combined product assortment consisting of both regular "standard" products and more fashionable and short-lived "special" products. The purpose of this practice is to increase store traffic by attracting heterogeneous classes of customers, which drives up sales of standard products due to the potential cross-selling effect. Customers who are primarily attracted by special products will also buy some standard products. In this context, we analyze three decisions that are crucial for a retailer's commercial success: the product assortment, the inventory levels and the pricing. We propose an optimization model and an iterative heuristic to analyze the tradeoffs between the combined product assortment, the inventory level and the price per product when there is limited shelf space. Using numerical experiments, we show that our heuristic can be trusted and that its accuracy improves when the number of products increases. Our findings indicate that to attract more customers for standard products, a retailer may benefit from carrying low priced special products which, if considered in isolation, would be non-profitable. As the cross-selling effect decreases, a retailer should focus more on the standard assortment by increasing its size and decreasing the prices. However, introducing special products and ignoring the cross-selling effect may decrease a retailer's profitability. We show that the introduction of special products involves more than just choosing the right specials for non-loyal customers but impacts the global assortment planning, the standard products and the products pricing. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Pergamon-Elsevier Science Ltd2014

Product assortment and space allocation strategies to attract loyal and non-loyal customers

Argyro Katsifou, Ralf Seifert, Anna Timonina-Farkas

Assortment planning deserves much attention from practitioners and academics due to its direct impact on retailers' commercial success. In this paper we focus on the increasingly popular retail practice to use combined product assortments with both "standard" and more fashionable and short-lived "variable" products for building up store traffic of "loyal" and "non-loyal" heterogeneous customers and enlarging the sales due to the potential cross-selling effect. Addressing the assortment planning as a bilevel optimization problem, we focus on decision-dependent uncertainties: the retailer's binary decision about product inclusion influences the distribution of the product's demand. Furthermore, our model accounts for customers' optimal purchase quantities, which depend on budget constraints limiting the basket that a customer is able to purchase. We propose iterative heuristics using optimal quantization of demand and customers budget distributions to define the total assortment and the inventory level per product. These heuristics provide lower bounds on the optimal value. We conduct a comparison to other existing lower bounds and we formulate upper bounds via linear (LP) and semidefinite (SDP) relaxations for the performance evaluation of the heuristics and for an efficient numerical solution in high-dimensional cases. For managerial insights, we compare the proposed approach with three assortment planning strategies: (1) the retailer does not carry variable products; (2) the retailer ignores the cross-selling effect; and (3) the maximum space allocated to each product is fixed. Our results suggest that variable assortment boosts the retailers profits if the cross-selling effect is not neglected in the decision about products quantities. (C) 2020 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.

2020

Delayed Multiattribute Product Differentiation

Thomas Alois Weber

We develop a two-stage model for versioning products with respect to both vertical and horizontal attributes. At first, a firm positions its top-quality “flagship” product in a market with an imperfectly known distribution of tastes and reservation prices. In the second stage, the firm learns these consumer characteristics and has the option of extending its product line by versioning the flagship product using pure horizontal differentiation, quality degrading, or both. The firm's nonconvex versioning problem is solved analytically for the two-product case. We find that ex ante extending the product line through vertical differentiation is optimal for low marginal cost of quality (development cost); otherwise pure horizontal differentiation is superior. Given quasilinear consumer preferences and a uniform distribution of consumer characteristics, versioning with respect to both horizontal and vertical attributes is never optimal. Under delayed differentiation the optimal policy is contingent on the observed demand realization and may lead to horizontal cannibalization and price dispersion for equal-quality products. The firm tends to increase its investment in product quality unless it adopts a state-contingent policy of horizontal versioning for high and vertical versioning for low demand realizations. Following a state-contingent policy, the optimal upfront development effort may be significantly lower than under full ex-ante commitment. The option value of delayed differentiation is generally nonmonotonic in the firm's development cost.

2008

Monopoly

A monopoly (from Greek mónos and pōleîn), as described by Irving Fisher, is a market with the "absence of competition", creating a situation where a specific person or enterprise is the only supp

Market (economics)

In economics, a market is a composition of systems, institutions, procedures, social relations or infrastructures whereby parties engage in exchange. While parties may exchange goods and services by

Perfect competition

In economics, specifically general equilibrium theory, a perfect market, also known as an atomistic market, is defined by several idealizing conditions, collectively called perfect competition, or a