Google, Google on the Wall: Which One Is the Most Successful New Product Demonstration of Them All? An Abstract

Firms aim to constantly develop new products and selectively reveal information about those activities to influence different parties, i.e., consumers, investors, and competitors. An important medium for this purpose is new product demonstration, which is defined as the disclosure of a new product at any stage of development and commercialization to the public. While new product demonstrations mainly aim to familiarize consumers with the new product characteristics and make sales efforts more efficient, they may also increase consumers’ interest in a brand, and hence, brand purchase.

In this paper, we investigate (by means of secondary data modeling) how the demonstration of new products may impact consumers’ online search behavior for the brand, and subsequently firms’ market performance. We believe that consumers’ search behavior reveals consumers’ mindset about brands and is an important predictor of future brand purchases. We also explore how the relationship between new product demonstrations and the online brand search could vary with the product’s development stage at the time of the demonstration.

Using automobile industry as our empirical context, we collected new car demonstrations in 10 different world-renowned international trade shows from 2005 to 2018. Our unbalanced, pooled, time-series dataset comprises 3447 observations of 22 brands from 10 major automakers and 108 trade shows. We also collected online search data for brands from the Google Trends database. The amount of “Googling” for a brand, demonstrated by the Google search volume index in near real-time, can serve as a proxy for the number of consumers seeking information about the brand. Our findings reveal that while new product demonstrations, on average, improve market performance through a boost in consumers’ online brand search, this relationship is stronger for new products at early and advanced stages of development, compared to the new products at the middle stage of development.

Our research has important implications for academicians as well as managers. From an academic perspective, responds to research calls for studies on investigating consumers’ behavioral responses to a firm’s new product efforts in novel ways (e.g. Google Trends Data). From a managerial perspective, being aware of the consumers’ online search helps managers to align their new product decisions with other marketing strategies such as advertising and promotions.