Proceedings of Annual Paris Business and Social Science Research Conference
7 - 8 August 2014, Hotel Crowne Plaza Republique, Paris, France, ISBN: 978-1-922069-57-3
Communicating Product Categories to the Audience through
Dialogue
Akira Yoshinari*
This paper is a study concerning categorical imperative in the category study of
markets. Categorical imperative means that when audience under categories such
as critics and customers cannot accept a certain product as a member of category,
firm producing this product would suffer penalty.
In this paper, in order to refine the discussion of categorical imperative, we will
study the case of a certain firm which launched some products in the market, where
most of these products were not a member of category; however, despite of that,
certain products were a member of category. Research question of this paper is to
understand from the company’s standpoint as how much variation in category of the
other product was considered as ambiguous for category of some products by
audience, resulting in the imposition of penalty. We will approach this research
question from both quantitative and qualitative aspects for generics in the
pharmaceutical industry. Finding of the present study is, higher is the effort made by
the firm for clearly defining the product categories used internally and
communicating these categories to the audience through dialogue, higher is the
understanding of product categories by the audience in keeping with the intentions of
the firm.
Field of Research: Management
References:
Ezra W. Zuckerman (1991)“The Categorical Imperative: Securities Analysts and the
Illegitimacy Discount”
American Journal of Sociology Vol. 104, No. 5, pp. 1398-1438.
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Assoc. Prof. Akira Yoshinari, Department of Business Administration, Aichi Institute of Technology,
Nagoya, Japan