“Managing Hype in Financial New Product Development: A Marketing Framework and Research Agenda”
(A2026-133115)

AUTHORS

William Gautschi, University of Bern, Marketing; Harley Krohmer, University of Bern; Andreas Hediger, University of Bern; Martin Delchev, Institut Le Rosey; Mathias Vitek, Riverside School; Kourosh Marashi, Institut Le Rosey

ABSTRACT

Hype is a pervasive feature of contemporary financial markets, from crypto funds and meme stocks to artificial intelligence (AI) exchange-traded funds (ETFs). Yet compared to constructs such as investor sentiment or buzz, hype remains conceptually fragmented and underdeveloped in marketing. This conceptual paper develops a marketing-oriented, new product development (NPD) perspective on hype in financial markets. We treat thematic and technology-linked funds - such as crypto vehicles, AI and robotics ETFs, leveraged semiconductor products, and failed hype funds (e.g., cannabis and “smart factory” ETFs) - as branded financial innovations whose trajectories are shaped by how hype is generated and managed across the product life cycle. We make four contributions for marketing and NPD scholars. First, we define hype as a multidimensional marketing construct - affective, social, narrative, and temporal - distinct from sentiment, buzz, FoMO, herding, and bubbles. Second, we embed hype in an NPD life-cycle framework for financial products, covering ideation, launch, growth, and maturity/decline. Third, we introduce an NPD Hype Trajectory Index (NHTI) as a conceptual measurement tool for capturing product-level hype dynamics. Fourth, we outline a research agenda and propositions for future empirical work in marketing on innovation management, investor behaviour, and financial product design. We argue that a conceptual paper is needed at this stage because theory on hype at the intersection of marketing, finance, and consumer behaviour is scattered and finance-centric, while marketing work on financial products is sparse. The paper therefore serves as a field-building, cross-disciplinary foundation for subsequent empirical research on how marketing can help households build wealth and retirement savings more responsibly, support asset managers in designing more robust financial innovations, and enable technology firms to secure capital for promising but hype-prone technologies such as AI.