In today's competitive market environment, it is vital for companies to gain insight about competitors' new product launches. Past studies have demonstrated the predictive value of prerelease online search traffic (PROST) for new product forecasting. Relying on these findings and the public availability of PROST, we investigate its usefulness for estimating sales of competing products. We propose a model for predicting the success of competitors' product launches, based on own past product sales data and competitor's prerelease Google Trends. We find that PROST increases predictive accuracy by more than 18% compared to models that only use internally available sales data and product characteristics of video game sales. We conclude that this inexpensive source of competitive intelligence can be helpful when managing the marketing mix and planning new product releases.
CC BY 4.0
© 2022 The Authors. Production and Operations Management published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Production and Operations Management Society.
First published: 24 June 2022
Correspondence
Oliver Schaer, Darden School of Business, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22903, USA. Email: schaero@darden.virginia.edu