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廠商在多重市場接觸下，競爭者行動如何影響其新產品上市速度與績效的關係？
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2. Design/Methodology/Approach
We selected the top four chain convenience stores in Taiwan (7-ELEVEN, Family Mart,
Hi-Life, and OK) as study samples and used structured content analysis to analyze the data.
In the first stage, we collected and surveyed all relevant news (from 2005 to 2012)
concerning the top corporations in terms of chain convenience store coverage from the
Knowledge Management Winner (KMW) database. In the second stage, each researcher
selected news articles (within an eight-year period) related to the top four chain convenience
stores. In the third stage, we identified competitive actions from the news articles and
organized coverage based on the definition of competitive action (Smith et al., 1991). In the
fourth stage, similar to the work of Chen and Hambrick (1995), we classified all competitive
actions into 12 types in accordance with the characteristics of the chain convenience store
industry. These types include all-store integrated marketing, cross-industry alliance
(including agency sales of tickets), new services, new products (subjective, seasonal, and
regular), product improvement, promotion (additional purchase price, joint purchase price,
lucky draw, complimentary products, festivals, and recharged cards), charity (public images),
store expansions, store closings, pre-purchases, price raising/cutting, and diversification.
These actions were confirmed by several senior managers of chain convenience stores and
marketing scholars. Such confirmation enhanced the expert validity of these actions.
In the fifth stage, the contents of news articles were analyzed by three assigned
researchers. After being tested by cross-verification, intercoder agreement can be calculated
as 0.92 by adopting the reliability formula proposed by Holsti (1969), which reaches the
standard of 0.9 proposed by Wimmer and Dominick (1983). In the sixth stage, we
simultaneously re-examined the aforementioned stages, discussed inconsistencies in the
selected news articles, and distinguished the types of actions to verify the accuracy of the
database. A final total of 6,648 competitive actions were retrieved from 1,666 news articles.
The measurement of the major variables in this study is conducted as follows. New
product launch speed is measured on the basis of the sum of the number of actions of focal
firms related to launching new products or services and then divided by the days in a certain
month. We take the natural log of monthly revenue of focal firms to measure their
performance. As for the MMC, referring to Gimeno and Woo (1996) and using geographic
areas as a reference, this study calculates the contact percentage among four convenience
stores in each county and city in Taiwan. Regarding the measurement of the number of
competitors’ actions, we sum up the number of actions that the focal firm undertakes to