What is Launch Marketing?

It is interesting how no proper definition exists for Launch Marketing (the term doesn't even exist in Wikipedia). Marketers commonly use it to deal with the tactics surrounding the introduction of new products to market, but for the purposes of this blog, Launch Marketing is an integrated marketing system, most commonly used for introducing new products, that aims at creating hyper demand resulting in an accelerated sales pace during the early days of the product life cycle.

Common examples of launch marketing campaigns include Apple's introduction of the iPhone, the arrival of the PS3, among many other excellent examples (some of which will be reviewed in detail later on in this blog).

Literature on the topic of launch marketing tactics is not extensive, yet most authors that have delved into it coincide with the fact that the product launch stage is critical for any product development. In 1996 Beard and Easingwood published an article in the Journal of Industrial Marketing Management, presenting a series of launch tactics for technology products according to their technological maturity. Their research journal titled 'New Product Launch: Marketing Action and Launch Tactics for High-Technology Products' was published by the Industrial Marketing Management journal (vol. 25, iss.2, pp. 87-103) and is available from IngentaConnect.

An interesting study by Bikhchandani, Hirshleifer, and Welch analyzed conformity and informational cascades in an effort to explain consumers' tendency to mimic behavior based on cues rather than thinking about their decisions; and how effective public information releases can be in the process of influencing consumers positively towards making a purchase decision. Their model offers a behavioral foundation to the launch marketing system helping us understand the value of maintaining a persistent communications flow as well as congregating buyers to encourage consumption and will be further analyzed in this blog. Their study 'A Theory of Fads, Fashion, Custom, and Cultural Change as Informational Cascades' is available from JSTOR and was published by the University of Chicago in The Journal of Political Economy (1992, vol. 100, no. 5).

The best way to understand launch marketing is reading through the case studies that will be published to this blog. We are hoping to continue developing more case studies as they happen, shedding light on new techniques and strategies that may help marketers introduce their own products successfully.