Product Presentation Strategies for Cable Television Home Shopping Channels

The emergence of the cable television era has spawned the introduction of many new television programming formats such as all-news channels, movie channels, channels catering to cultural events, channels for women, and many others. One of the new programming formats that is expected to have interesting implications for marketing is the home shopping channel. As we have observed in other countries, this new form of distribution may potentially have a major impact on the traditional retail industry. This paper presents a model of home shopping channel viewing behavior. This model is then used to formulate optimal product presentation strategies that may aid managers in the design of home shopping programs. Specifically, by formulating a profit-maximization problem based on tile model, we derive the optimal length of product presentations and explore its properperties through simulating various situations. The discussion of these properties provide insights about making strategic decisions regarding product presentations.