Product sales, especially for new products, are influenced by many factors. These factors are both internal and external to the selling organization, and are both controllable and uncontrollable. Due to the enormous complexity of such factors, it is not surprising that product failure rates are relatively high. Indeed, new product failure rates have variously been reported as between 40 and 90 percent.
Despite this multitude of factors, marketing researchers have not been deterred from developing and designing techniques to predict or explain the levels of new product sales over time. The...