The Motion Picture Industry: Critical Issues in Practice, Current Research, and New Research Directions

The motion picture industry has provided a fruitful research domain for scholars in marketing and other disciplines. The industry has high economic importance and is appealing to researchers because it offers both rich data that cover the entire product lifecycle for many new products and because it provides many unsolved “puzzles.” Although the amount of scholarly research in this area is rapidly growing, its impact on practice has not been as significant as in other industries (e.g., consumer packaged goods). In this article, we discuss critical practical issues for the motion picture industry, review existing knowledge on those issues, and outline promising research directions. Our review is organized around the three key stages in the value chain for theatrical motion pictures: production, distribution, and exhibition. Focusing on what we believe are critical managerial issues, we propose various conjectures—framed either as research challenges or specific research hypotheses—related to each stage in the value chain and often involved in understanding consumer movie-going behavior

Population Structure of Invasive Streptococcus pneumoniae in the Netherlands in the Pre-Vaccination Era Assessed by MLVA and Capsular Sequence Typing

The introduction of nationwide pneumococcal vaccination may lead to serotype replacement and the emergence of new variants that have expanded their genetic repertoire through recombination. To monitor alterations in the pneumococcal population structure, we have developed and utilized Capsular Sequence Typing (CST) in addition to Multiple-Locus Variable number tandem repeat Analysis (MLVA)

The Sales Effect of Word of Mouth: A Model for Creative Goods and Estimates for Novels

Weekly sales of creative goods – like music records, movies or books – usually peak shortly after release and then decline quickly. In many cases, however, they follow a hump-shaped pattern where sales increase for some time. A popular explanation for this phenomenon is word of mouth among a population of heterogeneous buyers, but previous studies typically assume buyer homogeneity or neglect word of mouth altogether. In this paper, I study a model of new-product diffusion with heterogeneous buyers that allows for a quantification of the sales effect of word of mouth. The model includes Christmas sales as a special case. All parameters have an intuitive interpretation. Simulation results suggest that the parameters are estimable for data that are not too volatile and that cover a sufficiently large part of a title’s life cycle. I estimate the model for four exemplary novels using scanner data on weekly sales.Meistens erreichen die wöchentlichen Verkäufe von kreativen Produkten wie Musikalben, Kinofilmen oder Büchern kurz nach Veröffentlichung ihren Höhepunkt und nehmen dann schnell ab. In einigen Fällen jedoch zeigen sie einen buckelartigen Verlauf mit zunächst ansteigenden Verkäufen. Eine populäre Erklärung für dieses Phänomen beruht auf der Existenz von Mundpropaganda unter heterogenen Käufern, doch bisherige Studien gehen typischerweise von der Annahme homogener Käufer aus oder vernachlässigen Mundpropaganda gänzlich. Dieses Papier betrachtet ein Modell der Verbreitung neuer Produkte unter heterogenen Käufern, welches eine Quantifizierung der Verkaufswirkung von Mundpropaganda ermöglicht. Das Modell beinhaltet Weihnachtsverkäufe als Spezialfall. Alle Modellparameter haben eine intuitive Bedeutung. Ergebnisse einer Simulation zeigen, dass die Parameter empirisch geschätzt werden können, wenn die Daten einen hinreichend großen Teil des Verkaufszyklus eines Titels abdecken und nicht zu volatil sind. Das Modell wird auf Scannerdaten für vier exemplarische Romane angewendet