Product and service innovation is important for brands to succeed in a competitive marketplace. As information technology advances, customer recognition becomes a growing industry trend; that is, brands track customers' purchase history, recognize and price discriminate between repeat and new customers.The trend of customer recognition has changed the nature and intensity of competition between brands. In this article, we examine how customer recognition and the associated changes in competition affect brands' incentives to invest in product and service innovation. We find that when brands have similar equity, customer recognition increases brands' incentives to invest in product and service innovation. However, when brands have sufficiently different equity, customer recognition leads the stronger brand to invest more and the weaker brand to invest less in product and service innovation. In addition, extant literature suggests that customer recognition reduces brand profits. In contrast, we find that customer recognition can increase the weaker brand's profit but decreases it more for the stronger brand. Thus, collecting customers' purchase history data for customer recognition can be beneficial for weaker brands but detrimental for stronger brands.

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产品和服务创新获得客户认可

产品和服务创新对于品牌在竞争激烈的市场中取得成功非常重要。随着信息技术的进步，客户认可度成为行业发展趋势；也就是说，品牌跟踪顾客的购买历史，对回头客和新顾客进行识别和价格区分。顾客认可的趋势改变了品牌之间竞争的性质和强度。在本文中，我们研究了客户认可以及相关的竞争变化如何影响品牌投资于产品和服务创新的动力。我们发现，当品牌拥有相似的资产时，客户认可会增加品牌投资于产品和服务创新的动力。然而，当品牌拥有足够不同的资产时，客户认可度会导致较强的品牌在产品和服务创新上投资更多，而较弱的品牌则减少投资。此外，现有文献表明，客户认可度会降低品牌利润。相比之下，我们发现客户认可可以增加较弱品牌的利润，但对于较强品牌来说会减少更多。因此，收集客户的购买历史数据以进行客户识别可能对较弱的品牌有利，但对较强的品牌不利。