Understanding New Products’ Market Performance Using Google Trends

This paper seeks to empirically examine diffusion models and Google Trends’ ability to explain and nowcast the new product growth phenomenon. In addition to the selected diffusion models and Google Trends, this study proposes a new model that incorporates the two. The empirical analysis is based on the cases of the iPhone and the iPad. The results show that the new model exhibits a better curve fit among all the studied ones. In terms of nowcasting, although the performance of the new model differs from that of Google Trends in the two cases, they both produce more accurate results than the selected diffusion models.