Research On Diffusion And Promotion Strategy For ICT Products

Technology innovation drives the progress of the society. Every time a new technology, a new product comes into a society, the members of the society become to be aware and adopt this new product, especially for network products like ICT product. ICT industry has achieved 20% of China's overall GDP, serving a great part of the economy and has become a platform to improve the competence of the country. So, the pattern and success of the diffusion of ICT new product becomes to be the focus of research. Also, the theory of complex network has been used as a research base. For the successful new products, the cumulative market penetration shows an S shaped curve: in the beginning, the diffusion is slow; after some time, the curve suddenly takes off; and finally reaches a steady market penetration. Producers have tried every method to increase the sales and profit of the product. This essay first build up an agent based model to depict the process of the new product adoption, including adoption network, to reflect the characteristics of the ICT products as well as the interaction among consumers and utilization function of the consumers. A lot of researches in the past focused on qualitative analysis of the sale promotion strategies. This thesis used Matlab simulation to study the sale promotion strategies based on this agent based model, focusing on the two commonly used strategies: free sampling and advertisement. It appeared that, considering the cost effect, the company should optimize the volume of the sampling as well as the balance between volume and batch. Company should consider the timing of the advertisement as well as the balance between the intensity and batch strategy to get the best return.