The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at http://www.emerald-library.com

New product launch ``mix'' in growth and mature product markets
University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK, and University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK
Keywords Marketing, Benchmarking, Product launch Abstract This research examines whether the marketing mix decisions for new product launch change over the product-market life cycle. Results raise questions about existing benchmark beliefs based on normative text-book theories. In view of new insights we suggest a number of directions for the theoretical and empirical development of the new product launch field in the marketing management discipline.

New product launch ``mix''

Susan Hart

389

Nikolaos Tzokas

1. Introduction The recent flurry of attention in the new product development literature given to the actual launching of new products (Chryssochoidis and Wong, 1998; de Bennedetto, 1998; Hultink et al., 1997) has filled several important gaps in our understanding of how to launch winning new products. While these contributions have been conceived to provide a ``broad brush'' approach to describing numerous decision variables during the new product launch cycle, the research described in this paper is designed to examine an area of marketing theory in NPD for which there has been surprisingly little empirical evidence: the extent to which the marketing mix decisions for new product launch change in view of the product-market life cycle. The need to vary marketing mix decisions over the product-market life cycle has been a critical benchmark (i.e. a reference point ± according to the New Collins Dictionary (1982), a benchmark is a mark on a stone post or other permanent feature, used as a reference point in surveying) that has navigated the development of the proactive nature of the marketing