A Study On The Effect Of Similarity On Product Performance In Hedonic Product Line Extension

With the improvement of people's living standard,hedonic products become more critical to enrich people's life.In addition to movie sequels,there are a large number of hedonic product line extension products,such as video franchise,book series,TV series and variety show seasons.The hedonic product line extensions are becoming more common and more important in people's lives.Therefore,an in-depth analysis in the field of hedonic product line extension will not only help create better hedonic products to enrich people's lives and meet people's expectations for a better material and spiritual life,but also provide more suggestions in formulating and implementing this critical growth strategy for market practitioners.Movie sequels,as a typical hedonic product extension,have both characteristics of hedonic products and line extension products.Today,the motion picture industry is the most important part of the entertainment industry and has become a driving force for countries to promote sound economic development.Hollywood film industry are among the best,especially Hollywood movie products are well received worldwide.Nowadays,a large number of newly-released movies are sequels,for example,Fast and Furious 5,Frozen 2,and Avengers: Endgame.In the past decade,nearly half of annual Top 20 movies were sequels,and those sequels' revenues accounted for an increasing percentages of total annual box office revenues.However,not all sequels are successful and there exist disappointing sequels simultaneously.For example,Bridget Jones' s Baby(2016),which received $24 million domestic box office revenue with estimated $35 million budget.It indicates that the motion picture industry has extreme uncertainty,including a heavy tail,severe skewness and variance.Accordingly,creating franchises out of blockbusters is desirable,while it is tremendously difficult to predict the success of a sequel.There is always a question why do some sequels become an immediate blockbuster achieving a great box office success and going viral over the world,while others are disastrous in the eyes of audiences and movie critics?In the field of product line extension,the academic literatures are abundant,and there are more cross-discipline approaches.However,there are also theoretical foundations and research paradigms that need to be integrated and developed.For example,more research is required to attach more importance to hedonic products.Moreover,for the key factors which impact on the success of hedonic product line extension,such as product attribute similarity,many theories and research results are contradictory.Especially on the effects,as well as the impact mechanism,of the content and execution that have a huge impact on the success of movie sequels,no researchers have made a systematic review and in-depth analysis.However,improving the understanding the content similarity and execution similarity of movie sequels is not only helpful to supplement the weak part in the field of hedonic product line extension research,but also provides strong data-based decision support for market practitioner in the motion picture industry.In addition,more studies in movie sequels also contribute to the rapid development of the global motion picture industry.Under the theoretical and industrial context,the study applies machine learning and text mining methods to construct the relevant content and execution similarities for movie sequels,and investigates the effects of these similarities on two aspects of product performance: commercial performance and critical performance.Additionally,the study also uses text analysis and survey method to further explore the effects of consumers' and critics' comments sentiment,consumers' perceived risk and experience-seeking characteristics on the relationship between different content and execution similarities and sequels' commercial performance as well as word-of-mouth performance.Thus,it is of guiding significance for the in-depth analysis in hedonic product line extension mechanism,as well as the effects of different content and execution similarities on consumer movie-seeing behaviors and word-of-mouth behaviors.Based on the empirical studies,the research results are listed as follows:Firstly,with regard to sequel's commercial success,there is a positive relationship between character similarity and opening weekend box office.It may be because the loyalty fans are attracted by the similar characters.Also,there is a U-shaped relationship between topic similarity and opening weekend box office.It is found that a significant and negative coefficient of sentiment similarity illustrates that there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between sentiment similarity and cumulative box office per theater.Secondly,in line with sequel's critical success,it is found that critics attach more importance to the crew similarity,while consumers focus on the cast similarity,and both sentiment and character similarity impact on Oscar nominations.All inverted-U relationships indicate that consumers,critics and Oscar nomination committee members prefer moderate similarity/dissimilarity based on expectation incongruency theory.Thirdly,in order to investigate how sequels' content and execution similarities impact on commercial and critical performance,this study applies machine learning,text mining and survey methods.By using text mining methods,the study examines the sentiment score of IMDb user reviews and Metacritic critic reviews.The study finds that different execution similarities exert the influence in consumer and critics' sentiment towards actors/actress and production team members,and eventually impact user rating and critic ratings.Moreover,consumer and critics' sentiment score,and user rating and critic ratings show a consistent trend of change.The survey method is used to supplement the research in finding how content similarities works,as well as how content and execution similarities impact on commercial performance.The study finds that consumers' perceived risk reduces the effects of content and execution similarities on purchase intensions,while consumers' experience-seeking characteries enhances the effects of content and execution similarities on positive word-of-mouth intensions.There are two main contributions to the literature.First,the previous literatures focus on characteristics of tangible products,and how characteristic of tangible products impact on the success of product line extension.Nonetheless,few studies discuss the intangible product attributes of hedonic product line extensions.Accordingly,under the context of movie sequels,this study constructs relevant content and execution similarities,investigate the effects of the movie script attributes,and further discuss the mechanism between similarities and product performance.Based on the importance of content analysis,the research contributes to quantify the movie content.Also,the research enriches line extension literatures in the domain of the motion picture industry by quantifying content and execution similarity from movie scripts by using machine learning methods.Therefore,the study contributes to supplement the research gap and provides a useful attempt for analysis in intangible product attributes in hedonic extension products.Secondly,given that little research investigates the type of sequels' similarity with their previous installment,the study considers both content and execution similarities are the critic factors for the success of the hedonic product line extension.Thus,the study evaluates the product performance from tow similarities,content and execution similarities,which enriches the movie sequel literature and hedonic product line extension literature.With the development of the motion picture industry in China,more Chinese movie databases will be established.Accordingly,it is of potential research to investigate the different roles of similarities under the Chinese cultural context.The future research may investigate the specific attributes that exert great influence in the success of Chinese movie sequels,and provide more theoretical support for the prosperity of Chinese movie industry.