The making of a "hot product": A signaling explanation of marketers' scarcity strategy
The making of a "hot product": A signaling explanation of marketers' scarcity strategy
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DOI：
10.1287/mnsc.1050.0381
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发表时间：
2005-08-01
影响因子：
5.4
通讯作者：
Balachander, S
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Stock, A;Balachander, S
每个营销人员的梦想都是创造一种顾客绝对想要的“热门产品”，从而为营销人员带来可观的利润。根据一种观点，营销人员应该让产品难以获得，以创造真正热门的产品。本文利用博弈论模型，研究了这种稀缺策略是否确实是最优的。虽然稀缺策略似乎是使公司产品成功的可行方法，但进一步的分析提出了一些令人困惑的问题。特别是，企业为什么不提高价格以使需求和供给同步并在此过程中增加利润，这是不清楚的。因此，我们为这些策略的最优性提供了一个信号解释，并表明一个高质量的卖家可能会最优地选择使产品稀缺，以便可靠地向不知情的客户发出其产品质量的信号。我们的分析表明，在产品市场中，高质量卖家最优地利用稀缺性作为信号装置，在其他条件不变的情况下，高质量和低质量产品的边际成本差异较小，低质量产品的保留价格较低，高质量产品的保留价格异质性较大，知情消费者数量适中。我们的研究结果为以下事实提供了一个基本原理，即稀缺策略通常适用于可自由支配的或特殊的产品，而不适用于大宗商品、主要产品或新产品。
Every marketer's dream is to create a "hot product" that customers would absolutely want to have, thus generating considerable profit to the marketer. According to one school of thought, marketers should make products hard to get in order to create really hot products. In this paper, using a game-theoretic model, we investigate if such scarcity strategies can indeed be optimal. While a scarcity strategy may appear to be a viable approach for making a firm's product successful, further analysis raises some puzzling issues. In particular, it is not clear why a firm would not increase its price to get demand and supply in sync and increase its profit in the process. We therefore offer a signaling explanation for the optimality of such strategies and show that a high-quality seller may optimally choose to make the product scarce in order to credibly signal the quality of its product to uninformed customers. Our analysis indicates that a high-quality seller optimally employs scarcity as a signaling device in product markets that are characterized, ceteris paribus, by a small difference in marginal cost between high- and low-quality products, a low reservation price for a low-quality product, a greater heterogeneity in reservation prices for a high-quality product, and a moderate number of informed consumers. Our results provide a rationale for the fact that scarcity strategies are usually observed for discretionary or specialty products, but not for commodity products, staple products, or new-to-the-world products.