“Who Are You?…I Really Wanna Know”: Product Meaning and Competitive Positioning in the Nascent Synthesizer Industry

Abstract

Please scroll down for article-it is on subsequent pagesWith 12,500 members from nearly 90 countries, INFORMS is the largest international association of operations research (O.R.) and analytics professionals and students. INFORMS provides unique networking and learning opportunities for individual professionals, and organizations of all types and sizes, to better understand and use O.R. and analytics tools and methods to transform strategic visions and achieve better outcomes. For more information on INFORMS, its publications, membership, or meetings visit http://www.informs.org I t is well established that firms make a series of positioning choices that shape how they compete within an industry. However, much of this work has examined competition within established industries where performance attributes are well understood. By contrast, we know little about how firms position their products within nascent industries, which often are characterized by extreme uncertainty about what the product even is. We address this gap through an inductive study of the emergence of the music synthesizer, drawing upon a unique data set of four leading firms' complete product offerings and advertisements from 1975 through 1986 as well as interviews with professional musicians over the same time period. We discover that conventional dimensions of competitive positioning, such as features and price, do not capture important distinctions in how firms framed their products. Rather, firms projected two distinct meanings for the synthesizer: a new instrument that enables a musician to create and/or play new "synth" sounds, or an emulator of acoustic instruments. These meanings were also salient amongst professional musicians. The fundamental differences in meaning were distinct from both the product label as well as the technical "reality" of each synthesizer, and shaped the ways in which firms positioned and thus differentiated their products. Specifically, our analysis reveals three meaning-based strategies for positioning new products: meaning-focusing, meaning-spanning, and meaningmixing. We also consider the implications of our findings for the literatures on emergent categories and on the social construction of technology.

Athena's Birth: Triggers, Actors, and Actions Preceding Industry Inception

“…Organizational theorists highlight how firm density is shaped by forces of legitimization and competition (Aldrich & Fiol, 1994;Hannan & Freeman, 1977) and note the role of social movements (Hiatt, Sine, & Tolbert, 2009;Pacheco, York, & Hargrave, 2014;Rao, 1994;Sine et al, 2005;Weber, Heinze, & DeSoucey, 2008) and socio-cognitive categories (Santos & Eisenhardt, 2009;Wry, Lounsbury, & Glynn, 2011) in influencing entrepreneurial entry and legitimizing industries. Technology management scholars attribute the rise in the number of firms to the need for experimentation prior to dominant design (Abernathy & Utterback, 1978;Tushman & Anderson, 1986), and they link experimentation paths to heterogeneity in firms' prior knowledge (Kapoor & Furr, 2015) or cognitive frames (Anthony, Nelson, & Tripsas, 2016;Benner & Tripsas, 2012;Garud & Rappa, 1994).…”

Experientially diverse customers and organizational adaptation in changing demand landscapes: A study of US cannabis markets, 2014–2016

“…Our paper suggests a potential pathway through which organizations may manage to keep up with the changing market, and in doing so we identify an important source of market feedback that blends the advantages of experiential and exploratory learning. It also complements existing work on the emergent processes through which entrepreneurs in nascent industries characterized by uncertain, shifting demand landscapes can attempt to learn and adapt to changing consumer preferences (Anthony et al, ; Shah & Tripsas, ).…”

“…They seek to portray a positive image along dimensions that are meaningful to external actors looking for information to help them choose among a set of potential exchange partners (Scott & Lane, 2000). In nascent markets where product meanings are still being formed, firms may also use claims to advance interpretations of their product that advance their strategic interests (Anthony, Nelson, & Tripsas, 2016).…”

Context, time, and change: Historical approaches to entrepreneurship research

“…Demil's approach could be applied to a variety of other research topics. First, it could be useful by researchers examining complex multilevel entrepreneurial processes that unfold over longer periods of time, such as processes related to knowledge spillovers (Agarwal, Audretsch, & Sarkar, , ), to incubation and evolution of industries (Agarwal, Moeen, & Shah, ; Moeen & Agarwal, ; Tripsas, ), to the dynamics of entrepreneurial bubbles (Goldfarb & Kirsch, ), to the process of "entrepreneuring," (Rindova, Barry, and Ketchen, 2009) and to how new product categories attain meanings (Anthony, Nelson, & Tripsas, ). Second, cultural histories could allow scholars to study more fully the antecedents, contexts, and consequences of “cultural entrepreneurship” as multilevel processes over time (Lounsbury & Glynn, ).…”