Developing winning marketing strategies in a competitive software market
Jue Wang, Robert L. Axtell, Andrew G. Loerch · 2017
Proposing effective marketing strategies is a challenging task for a software publisher when there are competitors in the same market. A software publisher cannot propose strategies without considering the impacts of strategies launched by his competitors. The situation becomes more complicated when software piracy is involved. The software piracy could lead to either a loss of profits or a boost in profits and diffusion speed, and its outcome relies on the marketing strategies. In this paper, a model is introduced to simulate a duopoly software market as a complex adaptive system. The model studies the competitive diffusion of two products, taking into consideration the impacts of software piracy and social network topologies. The model develops dynamic and self-learning marketing strategies which help the software publisher defeat his competitor. In addition, the model demonstrates that the outcome of competition is also influenced by the social network topologies.