This dissertation contains three essays that study the implications of online search activity for new-product marketing. Using the U.S. motion picture industry as a test case, the first essay examines the dynamic causal relationship between traditional media, consumers' media generation activity, media consumption activity, and market demand of movies. Consumers' media generation and consumption activities around movies are operationalized by the blog volume and search volume of those movies. I develop three separate models--a pre-launch period model, a post-launch period model, and an opening-week model--and examine the relationship between them separately for each period. As the focal variables are jointly determined, I introduce instruments and explain how to correct for endogeneity bias. I find that consumer searching activity is a key mediator between advertising, consumer blogging activity, and market demand.

The second essay examines the pre-launch advertising effectiveness of new products using online search indexes as the response variable. I model the relationship between the advertising schedule and the online search volume process during the pre-launch period of movies. The model incorporates consumers' willingness-to-search and the time-varying effectiveness of advertising as key elements that influence online search volume at specific times. The model is represented in a Bayesian dynamic linear model framework and applied to the U.S. movie industry. The empirical analysis reveals important features of consumers' pre-launch interest development for new products. First, consumers' pre-launch responses to advertising are substantially influenced by the timing of advertising. Second, advertising effectiveness varies over time as a function of past advertising outlay. Third, the time-to-launch effect and time-varying advertising effectiveness vary substantially across movies. The estimation results are used to suggest a more effective pre-launch advertising schedule.

The third essay provides an explanation of the varying predictive power of online search volume by examining the effects of consumers' quality perception on the search activity for and actual demand of new products. I hypothesize that both the perceived quality and quality uncertainty of a new product increase consumers' search activity for the new product, while only perceived quality positively influences the conversion of search activity into actual demand. Using the U.S. movie industry as a test case, I find that both perceived quality and quality uncertainty are positively associated with the pre-launch search volume of movies, whereas only perceived quality positively influences the conversion of pre-launch searches into opening-week revenue. Similar findings are maintained in the post-launch period analysis. These findings imply that systematic over-/under-prediction of market success may occur if managers use an online search index without considering the effects of quality and quality uncertainty of new products.

This dissertation introduces methods to quantitatively model the effects of human needs for social status on consumer behavior. More precisely, in this dissertation we: a) propose the first actionable metrics of the social status signaled by brands as functions of product line prices; b) use the new metrics and a new model of quality choice to show that both the ability and the motivation to pursue social status through consumption are affected by the economic resources available to consumers; c) identify the product line composition and pricing strategies that favor the sales of status-signaling products and brands under different levels of economic inequality among consumers. Important methodological and managerial contributions are drawn from the proposed metrics and models. For instance, the inclusion of the status metrics in the models allow the models to abstract rich substitution patterns. In terms of managerial implications, we find that including affordable products into a brand's product line may not harm the social status signaled by the brand as long as the median price of the line is relatively high and the most sold product is not very expensive. We also find that increasing consumer wealth inequality enhances the demand for low-end brands by increasing the dispersion of consumer preferences for status signaling and their saliency. High-end brands, in contrast to low-end brands, should adapt to increasing inequality by equalizing the social status of their product lines across product categories.