Evolutionary Marketing Strategies for New High-Technology Product Sales: Effects of Customers’ Innovation Adoption

Abstract

The level of product innovation is a prerequisite for high-technology product manufacturers to remain competitive. However, the customers of such products may behave differently in adopting innovative products, as proven by the innovation-adoption theories. Accordingly, the marketing strategy of distributing firms becomes critical in promoting the customers’ innovation adoption. Such distributors also face competitive markets where the rivals may choose dominant strategies. Regarding these issues, this article proposes a model for strategy adoption of competitive high-technology distributors, considering the impacts of external factors (including customers’ innovation-adoption behavior and rival's actions). To this end, an evolutionary game model is developed for the competitive distributors’ strategy adoption. Meanwhile, the impacts of customers’ behaviors are modeled based on the innovation-adoption theories and applied in the demand functions that are inputs for the evolutionary game model. If replacement and sales services are two alternative strategies that the competitive distributors can choose, this model determines which one is the evolutionary stable marketing strategy for them. The analyses demonstrated that the replacement service is the strategy that will finally be adopted by a plethora of distributors in the long run. The results shed light on the determination of marketing strategies.