Category spanning, naming strategies and performance implications in the US film industry

In this paper, we introduce naming as a legitimatizing tool that allows producers to use genre spanning as a way of differentiation without being ignored or devalued by audiences. With the product name providing a legitimacy shield, genre spanning helps reduce audience satiation and leads to higher performance of the product. In addition to the legitimacy shield function, the product name can also be manipulated to a certain extent and different naming strategies can be used to achieve distinctiveness. An analysis of film sequels released in the US market between 1982 and 2007 largely corroborated these propositions. The findings also indicate that the differentiation through genre spanning and naming strategies is more beneficial for the focal film sequel when the previous film in the same film series performs worse.