Samira Reis

Research Summary: Research on competitor identification has primarily focused on intra‐industry competition. However, cross‐industry competitive threats are prevalent and consequential. We adopt a consumer‐oriented perspective to examine how consumer perceptions shape de facto competition across industry boundaries. Drawing from social cognition theories, we introduce two mechanisms—cultural embeddedness and social salience—that lead consumers to perceive products in an emerging industry as viable substitutes for those in an established industry, thereby intensifying competitive pressures on established firms. We further hypothesize that the impact of these mechanisms varies across heterogeneous customer groups, specifically with respect to income, education, and immigration status. Event history analyses of Illinois movie theater failures during television's rise in 1944–1962 support our theorizing. Managerial Summary: Identifying competitors can be a complex managerial task. While it often suffices to monitor only within‐industry competitors, unexpected cross‐industry rivals selling seemingly different products can create competitive blind spots. To identify cross‐industry competitive threats, we propose a demand‐based view to complement managerial perceptions: Do your customers view your offerings as interchangeable with emerging products? We find that when an emerging industry's products embody cultural elements borrowed from the established industry's offerings or resonate better with public discourse, customers are likely to perceive substitutability and switch to the emerging products. However, this tendency varies among customers with different profiles, making it essential to recognize which customer segments are more vulnerable when facing cross‐industry competition.

A documented recent rise in the polarization of American legislative politics underscores the question of how increasing political polarization affects organizations and industries. Yet, organizational scholars have not directed significant attention to the impact of polarization. In this paper, we demonstrate that political polarization may play an important role in organizational dynamics by revealing that polarization may expedite the destigmatization of legal yet historically stigmatized industries. To this end, we develop a theory explaining how political polarization normalizes counter-normative behavior and encourages customers to become open about their engagement with stigmatized products and organizations—a key step toward industry destigmatization. We further argue that this polarization impact may vary across regional markets because of differences in local legitimation processes that can either amplify (normative legitimacy) or attenuate (regulatory legitimacy) the effect of polarization on consumer engagement with a stigmatized industry. We find empirical evidence for our theorizing in analyses of all U.S. dispensaries of medical marijuana that existed on the online platform Weedmaps.com from its beginning in 2008 to 2014. Ultimately, this paper suggests that political polarization can significantly influence organizations and industries and thus warrants more systematic investigation and attention from organizational scholars, particularly in stigmatized industries.

Industrial clusters are an important driver of economic growth, but regions with comparable resource profiles do not necessarily produce similar clusters. We propose that religion may play an important role in the spatial arrangement of industries and can explain why regions with similar resources do not produce similar clusters. We advance a theory predicting a suppressive effect of religion on the development of industrial clusters in morally controversial industries. We argue that in such industries, regions dominated by denominations that treat controversial industries as immoral will experience lower firm entry rates, compared to regions with a lower presence of such denominations. We theorize about three underlying processes. First, in regions dominated by religious groups opposing a controversial industry, negative attitudes of religious actors generate social environments unfavorable to businesses in this industry. Second, there could be an ecological effect of religion wherein the suppressive impact of a focal region’s oppositional religiosity is mitigated when neighboring regions have higher oppositional religiosity than that of the focal region. Finally, in regions with high oppositional religiosity, religious social movements are likely to emerge to target a controversial industry and its participants, which should further repel potential entrants. Our event-count analyses of biotherapeutics firm entry rates in U.S. metropolitan statistical areas from the industry’s beginning in 1976 through 2004 support our predictions.

How do customers discover new products? Recent research has found that a firm can facilitate the discovery and subsequent purchase of its product by giving it an advantageous name. However, no product exists in isolation, rather it competes for customer attention with other products both within and across product niches. We theorize that a product may benefit from the names of competitors’ products within its niche because certain product names can trigger a positive spillover effect. Specifically, product viability should increase with the proliferation of products with informative names in a focal niche because informative names attract attention to the niche, and consequently benefit all its products, regardless of whether they have informative names or not. This beneficial influence should be especially strong when a niche is new. Additionally, a product’s market fate may depend not only on the prevalent naming practices in its niche, but also on naming practices in competing niches. We find support for our theorizing in event‐history analyses of all CD‐drive products shipped in the worldwide optical disk drive industry, 1983–1999. Ultimately, our findings suggest that in high‐velocity markets, to facilitate product discovery by customers, firms should enter niches populated by products with informative names.

Authenticity commonly refers to a key attribute of organizational identity and a source of competitive advantage. Promotional claims on attributes associated with authenticity, such as geographic p...

Diversified firms may benefit from fungible resources because they can give firms flexibility to adapt to changing environmental conditions. However, the benefits of fungible resources could be lim...

Many legalized markets bear categorical stigma—a vilifying label attached to an industry and its participants—that threatens their performance and survival chances. This happens because audiences avoid engagement with stigmatized organizations to minimize the probability of stigma transfer. Although scholars have explored what strategies stigmatized companies undertake to mitigate their stigma, we know very little about whether and how audiences’ acceptance of stigmatized organizations actually happens and if industry-level processes play a role in this acceptance. We develop a theory of identity exposure predicting that customers will become less concerned about stigma transfer when stigmatized organizations unambiguously reveal their identities by publicly advocating and celebrating their business and when vanguard customers openly discuss stigmatized organizations and their products in public forums. We find support for our theorizing in the analyses of customers’ concerns about stigma in Weedmaps.com —a marijuana-based community—from its inception in 2008 through 2014. Ultimately, our findings and extensive robustness checks suggest that identity exposure within stigmatized industries can alleviate customers’ concerns about stigma transfer and in this way accelerate the market destigmatization process.

The market fate of a product ultimately determines the success or failure of a firm. A name is a central feature of any product, yet how names affect product market longevity is not well understood. In this paper we develop a theory in which a new product’s name affects the product’s categorization by audiences and, as a result, impacts its survival chances on the market. We predict that the similarity of the new product’s name to names of other products in the industry affects its survival probability, but the direction and magnitude of this effect depends on the popularity and status of products, to names of which the new product’s name is similar. We test our predictions on the population of all TV programs that were introduced during prime time plus early evening and late night on networks in the United States from the beginning of the industry in 1944 through 2003. An event history analysis of this population supports our predictions and thus suggests the importance of names in product market viability.

Recent research on market categories revealed that while most audiences penalize producers that span multiple market categories by withdrawal of resources and attention, few audiences react to boundary spanners in more positive ways. It remains unknown, however, whether different audiences affect each other’s judgments and, if they do, what the consequences of this mutual influence for boundary spanners are. We develop a theory explaining how three different types of audiences, namely, investors, consumers and critics, react to an extraordinary past success of a boundary spanning producer. We argue that these three audiences rely on different evaluation criteria to assess the producer’s success. When different audiences disagree in their evaluation of the boundary spanner, they tend to ignore each other’s judgments when deciding how to interact with this producer. However, when different audiences agree that the boundary spanner achieved an extraordinary success, all three different audiences tend to ignore boundary spanning and reward this producer. We find support for our theory in the probit analysis of the population of all co- productions of TV shows created for the primetime on networks in the U.S., 1947- 2003.

The performance of firms depends not just on the structure of the industries in which they compete but also on their relative positioning within those industries, in terms of operating within particular niches. We propose that demand for these niches depends endogenously on the historical ecology of the products offered: N iches become saturated—reduced in their ability to support products—as a large number of previous offerings allows the audience to satisfy its desire for products of a particular type. Analyzing the survival rates of television series aired in the U nited S tates from 1946 to 2003, we found that the survival rates of future entrants fell with the extensiveness of recent offerings in the niche, and that the negative association between crowding and survival also weakened with this saturation . Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.