Emergence of a Pharmaceutical Drug as New Entrant in a Category: Ex Ante Diffusion of Innovation Modeling and Forecasting

The emergence of a product, new entrant in a category, is a relevant issue in marketing strategy implementation. Usually, diffusion of in- novation models analyze single products or services when they are active in the marketplace for a sufficient time interval as compared with related life cycles. If product sales data are available since the launch, robust inference and pre- diction for each item may be efficiently performed. More complex and risky is the prediction with no specific data for a new entrant. This paper analyzes the temporal sequence of observed life cycles in a category to assess and estimate ex ante the dynamics that characterize the launch time and the future features of a new entrant. A case study is examined: the introduction in Italy of a new pharmaceutical drug within the category of treatments for acid-related disorders based on the ranitidine.