The Role of Seeding in Multi-Stage vs. Two-Stage Diffusion Models

Seeding the market by delivering free samples is a common strategy marketers use to promote new products, shorten the introduction stage and accelerate diffusion. There are several models for assessing seeding effectiveness and determining the optimal seeding that can maximize profits, given costs, diffusion parameters’ values and interest rates. In practice, however, managers use seeding mainly as a competitive tool, as a way to improve market position rather than to promote and accelerate the diffusion of a new product category. Actual seeding is quite small in volume compared to the optimal levels recommended by existing models. Seeding is also accompanied by other steps which do not involve giving away products. It is argued here that the problem is not the fact that marketers do not implement an optimal strategy, but rather the modeling itself. We present a method for analyzing seeding effectiveness and optimization, based on a diffusion model with a multi-stage purchase process, as suggested by Kalish. We compare the diffusion acceleration and optimal seeding assessments of our model against existing seeding assessment and optimization diffusion models that are based on a two-stage purchase process as described in the Bass model. To achieve optimization our model recommends seeding, as a means to accelerate the diffusion of new product categories, only in rare cases. This coincides much better with firms’ actual implementation of seeding strategies than seeding levels recommended by models in the literature. In particular, it is aligned with managers’ intuition that diffusion models with a two-stage purchase can lead to oversampling and an overestimated sales acceleration forecast.