Quadratic-interval Bass model for new product sales diffusion

An appropriate new product diffusion method is vital to a business firm for developing marketing strategies aimed at potential adopters. The Bass (1969) [Bass, F. M. (1969). A new product growth model for consumer durables. Management Science, 15, 215–227] model is an important innovation diffusion model used to forecast the growth speed and the potential market volume of innovative products and relies on statistics to explain the relationships between the dependent and independent variables. However, fuzzy relationships are more appropriate for describing the relationships between dependent and independent variables, since these relationships require less data than traditional models to generate reasonable estimates of parameters. Therefore, we have combined fuzzy regression with the Bass model to develop a quadratic-interval Bass diffusion model, and we have applied the models to three cases. When insufficient data are available, quadratic-interval Bass diffusion models are potentially useful tools. However, when there is high variability in the data, the quadratic-interval Bass model should not be used. Our practical application shows that the quadratic-interval Bass model is an appropriate tool that can reveal the best and worst possible sales volume outcomes.