Product Variety Management

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xix

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2. Markets and Product Variety Management

   • Kelvin Lancaster

   Pages 1-18

3. Variety: From the Consumer’s Perspective

   • Barbara Kahn

   Pages 19-37

4. Product Structure, Brand Width and Brand Share

   • Juin-Kuan Chong, Teck-Hua Ho, Christopher S. Tang

   Pages 39-64

5. Value of Postponement

   • Seungjin Whang, Hau Lee

   Pages 65-84

6. Designing Task Assembly and Using Vanilla Boxes to Delay Product Differentiation: An Approach for Managing Product Variety

   • Jayashankar M. Swaminathan, Sridhar R. Tayur

   Pages 85-102

7. Design for Variety

   • Mark Martin, Warren Hausman, Kosuke Ishii

   Pages 103-122

8. Customer Preferences, Supply-Chain Costs, and Product-Line Design

   • Fangruo Chen, Jehoshua Eliashberg, Paul Zipkin

   Pages 123-144

9. Profit-Optimizing Product Line Design, Selection and Pricing with Manufacturing Cost Consideration

   • Candace Yano, Gregory Dobson

   Pages 145-175

10. Managing Product Variety

    • Karl Ulrich, Taylor Randall, Marshall Fisher, David Reibstein

    Pages 177-205

11. Managing Variety in Software Features

    • Mayuram S. Krishnan, Sunder Kekre, Tridas Mukhopadhyay, Kannan Srinivasan

    Pages 207-225

12. Back Matter

    Pages 227-233

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Product proliferation has become a common phenomenon. Most companies now offer hundreds, if not thousands, of stock keeping units (SKUs) in order to compete in the market place. Companies with expanding product and service varieties face with problems of obtaining accurate demand forecasts, controlling production and inventory costs, and providing high quality and good delivery performance for the customers. Marketing managers often advocate widening product lines for increasing revenue and market share. However, the breadth of product line can also decrease the efficiency of manufacturing processes and distribution systems. Thus firms must weigh the benefits of product variety against its cost in order to determine the optimal level of product variety to offer to their customers. Academics and practitioners are interested in several fundamental questions about product variety. For instance, why do companies extend their product lines? Do consumers care about product variety? Will a brand with more variety enjoy higher market share? How should product variety be measured? How can a company exploit its product and process design to deliver a higher level of product variety quickly and cheaply? What should the level of product variety be and what should the price of each of the product variants be? What kind of 'challenges would a company face in offering a high level of product variety and how can these obstacles be overcome? The solutions to these questions span multiple functions and disciplines.

• Business
• Management
• Manufacturing
• Marketing
• Operations Research
• Performance
• production

• Anderson School at UCLA, USA

  Teck-Hua Ho, Christopher S. Tang

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