Abstract
Previous studies show that product sampling is one of the effective marketing strategies to stimulate the real time and future consumption. In order to increase software sales, many software vendors use the online product sampling strategy, i.e., releasing free online samples of their software products to consumers for trial. Consumers can freely download and try the lower version of software without a time limitation or they can freely access and try the full version of the software as Demo edition within a limited time period. Product sampling for information goods like software has some advantages over that for some physical products like pizza. Firstly, unlike pizza sample, which Pizza Hut needs flour, cheese and meat to make, the software vendor incurs nearly zero marginal cost to make a software sample. Secondly, for physical products, the product sampling strategy is usually only applied to non-durable products such as shampoo. As information good, software is durable good. The software vendor needs to supply only one copy of the software to the sampler for whatever length period trial. Since there is a substitution or cannibalization effect between the product and the product sample, non-durable physical product sample attains the whole quality of the product, but has restriction on quantity. For example, shampoo producer gives only 5 bags of shampoo with full quality as product sample to one household. Generally, in order to avoid the substitution or cannibalization effect between the sample software and the original software itself, software sampling is restricted either in its quality (functionality) or in its time length of legitimate usage. Therefore, we have two types of sampling strategies for software: the low-quality sampling strategy and the limited-time-trial sampling strategy.
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© 2015 Academy of Marketing Science
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Tu, Y., Lu, M. (2015). Modeling Dynamic Software Sampling Strategies. In: Spotts, H. (eds) Marketing, Technology and Customer Commitment in the New Economy. Developments in Marketing Science: Proceedings of the Academy of Marketing Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11779-9_76
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11779-9_76
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