Publications
Publications
- January 2022
- Strategic Management Journal
Pushed into a Crowd: Repositioning Costs, Resources, and Competition in the RTE Cereal Industry
By: Young Hou and Dennis Yao
Abstract
This paper exploits a natural experiment involving self-regulation in the ready-to-eat (RTE) breakfast cereal industry to evaluate the performance impact of product repositioning. It then examines how a product's brand equity value declines with repositioning distance and explores various nonprice responses of firms to increased own and rival competition. Self-regulation led to a crowding of the product space by forcing differentiated products to become more similar. We find that products constrained by regulation performed relatively worse than unconstrained products. Furthermore, brand equity specific to a product was tightly linked to existing product positions. Increased competition also led to increased brand equity investments and some products with strong brand equity repositioned more aggressively than those with weak brand equity.
Keywords
Positioning; Resources; Brand Equity; Competitive Dynamics; Non-market Strategy; Regulation; Repositioning; Product Positioning; Performance Evaluation; Brands and Branding; Competitive Strategy; Consumer Products Industry
Citation
Hou, Young, and Dennis Yao. "Pushed into a Crowd: Repositioning Costs, Resources, and Competition in the RTE Cereal Industry." Strategic Management Journal 43, no. 1 (January 2022): 3–29.