When encountering novel products, people typically use analogies to familiar products to describe or “make sense” of new ones. When cell phones were first introduced, for example, they were compared to land-line phones and walkie-talkies. The areas of product knowledge from which people draw...

This paper explores the origins and evolution of product markets from a socio-cognitive perspective. Product markets are defined as socially-constructed knowledge structures (i.e., product conceptual systems) that are shared among produces and consumers--sharing that allows consumers and...