Hmm...What's That? How Categories Can Help Your Company Be a Tempo Mover in Nascent Industries
MIT Sloan Management Review, Forthcoming
16 Pages Posted: 14 Nov 2014
Date Written: November 13, 2014
Abstract
What’s in a name? Although Shakespeare claimed that a rose “by any other name would smell as sweet,” over the last five to ten years, significant research on category labels has shown the opposite to be true. This research finds that a company’s labeling strategy can have important performance implications for products in nascent markets. As part of our research in this growing field we followed the more than 200 category labels that smartphone producers used to introduce new products since roughly the beginning of the 21st century. We also studied the labels used in almost a dozen other industries. What we found may surprise you.
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