AND KEYWORDS AbstractLiterature suggests that in battles between competing designs, ultimately one design will emerge as dominant to the detriment of the others. shows that a combination of factors may result in multiple designs and we argue that such a combination of factors will increasingly also apply in other cases.
AND KEYWORDS AbstractLiterature suggests that in battles between competing designs, ultimately one design will emerge as dominant to the detriment of the others. shows that a combination of factors may result in multiple designs and we argue that such a combination of factors will increasingly also apply in other cases.
Literature suggests that in battles between competing standards, ultimately one standard will emerge as the dominant one to the detriment of the others. Various factors and forces have been identified to explain this phenomenon. The factor of marketing communications is one of these. This paper addresses its influence on standards dominance by analyzing 46 different standards from the high tech industry developed by consortia. We found five determinants of marketing communications, each with a direct positive impact on standards dominance . This study is new in applying insights from marketing (communications) literature to standards battles and in empirically showing the impact of marketing communications on standards dominance. Our findings have managerial implications both for standardization consortia and for participants in these consortia. 1 echnology standards such as the DVD became dominant to the detriment of competing standards such as SVCD or Video CD. Past research (Flipsen, 2007) has shown how standards such as the DVD specifications, but also standards that were less successful such as the SVCD or Video CD can be informative about the success factors for future dominance of standards that are currently still in battle. Many of these standards are developed in consortia, where several stakeholders (e.g. companies or knowledge institutions, and other actors) join forces and add value to the realization and successfulness of a standard. We will focus on battles between compatibility standards: standards that define the interface between two or more mating elements that are compatible rather than similar, e.g., a plug and a socket, a transmitter and a receiver (Krechmer, 1996). Such interface specifications are sometimes also referred to as (dominant) designs (Suarez, 2004;Schilling, 2002) though that term can be used broader. 'The dominant standard is not automatically the technologically superior one, nor will it meet the needs of a particular class to the same extent as a customized standard would' (e.g. Anderson &Tushman, 1990 andUtterback, 1994). Van de Kaa et al. (2011) made an inventory of factors that contribute to standards dominance and studied their impact. In a historical multi-case study, Flipsen (2007) investigated 46 cases of standards that had competed for dominance, 23 with success and 23 with failure. His statistical analysis revealed two factors to be the most important ones: marketing communications and backwards compatibility. For our research project we have therefore decided to focus on one of these factors, marketing communications, and in a parallel project we have investigated backwards compatibility. So in this paper we ignore other less important but nevertheless also relevant factors such as intellectual property. In this paper, we identify the causes that determine marketing communications as an important factor influencing the dominance of a standard. A standard will be considered as the dominant one, when more than 50% of new installations in a product category use the st...
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