The order of market entry is known to be critical to firms' survival and success. Thus much research about the relationship between order of entry and market performance was performed in many areas. A prevalent view among both academics and managers is that pioneers enjoy an enduring advantage over other late market entrants. However, two major problems exist in established literature. First, most research mainly depend on an ex post facto judgment. The main databases used for past research have a sampling bias of including only survivors. The exclusion of pioneers that have failed may overstate the advantage of pioneers. Second, in defining a pioneering, most research were limited to a manufacturer(product)-oriented view. However, the success or failure of the market pioneer is swayed by the consumer. That is, consumers' perceived order is more important than market entry order, which makes the advantages of market pioneer. Therefore, this study addresses how a market pioneer is recognized by consumers and when the advantage of market pioneer is sustained.
The results of this thesis is as follows; First, as physical performance improvement of new product increases, so does the subjects' perceived improvement. However, if the improvement is under a certain level, it makes little impact on the perception of consumers. Second, as the performance variance of established products is smaller, the more sensitive is the consumer's response to the performance improvement. Third, consumer's difficulties (ambiguity and uncertainty) in evaluating a new product performance is decreased by an effective positioning strategy. Finally, perceptions that a new product is highly improved result in a subtyped position, whereas perceptions that a new product is less improved result in a differentiated position within the established category. In summary, for a product to be perceived as a pioneer in a newly emerging product category it requires things like a substantial physical performance improvement, an effective positioning strategy, high marketing efforts, and several me-too followers.
