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Reference

Li, Y., Reis, S., & Khessina, O. M. (2025). When should firms watch for cross-industry competition? A demand-side perspective. Strategic Management Journal, 1–49. https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.70034

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Welcome to Revise and Resubmit 🎙️✨
The podcast where dense PDFs turn into sharp ideas, and where your weekend self and your weekday scholar finally agree on something. 📚☕

Today, we’re stepping into a story about competition you think you understand… until it sneaks up on you from the wrong industry.
Some rivals look like you.
Some rivals sell what you sell.
And some rivals… stream into your living room while your business quietly dies on Main Street. 🎬🏙️

The paper on the table today is:
📝 “When should firms watch for cross-industry competition? A demand-side perspective”
by Ying Li, Samira Reis, and Olga M. Khessina.

Published in the Strategic Management Journal – yes, that prestigious, field-defining, FT50-listed journal that sits at the top of tenure packets and dream CVs. 🏛️⭐
And hot off the press, too: published on 20 November 2025 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Here’s the twist.
This isn’t just another story about firms staring nervously at their closest rivals.
This is a demand-side lens. 👀
Instead of asking, “Who do we think our competitors are?” the authors ask, “Who do our customers secretly think our competitors are?”

They dive into the rise of television and the fall of Illinois movie theaters from 1944 to 1962. 🎥📺
Same free evening.
Same human need for stories and escape.
Different technology, different industry…
But in the consumer’s mind?
Substitutes.

Two powerful mechanisms drive this hidden competition:
🎭 Cultural embeddedness – when new products borrow the cultural feel, symbols, or rituals of the old ones, they slip into the same mental slot in consumers’ heads.
📢 Social salience – when emerging products dominate public talk, media buzz, and social imagination, they start to define what “counts” as the way to spend time or money.

And it gets trickier.
Not all customers see these substitutes the same way.
Income matters.
Education matters.
Immigration status matters.
Different groups, different thresholds for saying, “You know what? This new thing… is good enough to replace the old thing.” 💸🎓🌍

So today on Revise and Resubmit, we’re going to unpack how cross-industry competition lives first in the mind of the customer, not in the NAICS code of the firm.
We’ll ask what this means for managers scanning the horizon, for strategy scholars mapping industries, and for anyone who still thinks “our real competitors look just like us.”

🎧 Before we dive in, hit follow and subscribe to Revise and Resubmit on Spotify, Amazon Prime, and Apple Podcast, and check out the YouTube channel Weekend Researcher for more deep dives that fit into your weekend but sharpen your weekday thinking. 💥

Huge thanks to the authors Ying Li, Samira Reis, and Olga M. Khessina, and to the publisher John Wiley & Sons Ltd., for this fascinating contribution in the Strategic Management Journal, a truly elite FT50 journal pushing the frontier of strategy research. 🙏📖

So, as we get started, ask yourself:
If your customers drew a map of your competitive landscape—not you, not your consultant—what unexpected industry would suddenly appear right next to you on that map? 🤔🚀