Full Length Article The direct and indirect effects of economic wealth on time to take-off Towhidul Islam a, ⁎, Nigel Meade b a Department of Marketing and Consumer Studies, University of Guelph, 50 Stone Road East, Guelph, Ontario N1G 2W1, Canada b Imperial College Business School, South Kensington Campus, London SW7 2AZ, UK article info abstract Article history: First received on January 11, 2017 and was under review for 5 months Available online xxxx Our objective is to decompose the influence of the economic wealth on the time to sales take-off into a direct effect and an indirect effect through time to introduction. We use a traditional regression based and an advanced counterfactual framework for our analysis, based on adoption data for four generations of mobile phone from 172 countries. Our study extends the sales take- off literature by better understanding how the commercialization stage (time to introduction) affects the confirmation stage (time to sales take-off) in innovation diffusion while controlling for local market structure, socio-economic, demographic and cultural variables suggested in the literature. We show that economic wealth exerts: a positive direct effect by shortening sales take-off time; a negative indirect effect by shortening time to introduction which tends to extend time to sales take-off. The uncovering of this relationship is achieved by treating time to introduction as a mediating variable, departing from previous studies where it is treated as an exogeneous variable. We further show that the negative indirect effect is diluted in the case of high income countries but not in the case of upper middle-income countries. A sensitivity analysis shows the robustness of our findings. Our findings will help firms develop optimal market entry strategies considering the resources available. © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Time to introduction Time to sales take-off Mediation Mobile phones 1. Introduction Our objective is to explore the relationship between the time to sales take-off for a technology and a country's prosperity, bearing in mind the time taken by the country to launch that technology. We focus our analysis on the introduction and subsequent diffusion of mobile phone technology in 172 countries. Telecommunications is a highly capital-intensive industry, thus the timing of the decision to introduce cellular technology in a country is at firm level, influenced by the country's wealth. In contrast, the decision makers who drive sales take-off are mainly individual consumers or households. Sales take-off is the beginning of the growth period in a product's life cycle, it occurs when a new product's sales growth rate crosses a threshold based on penetration level. We use the timing threshold formula developed by Tellis, Stremersch, and Yin (2003) and Golder and Tellis (1997). Understanding the determinants of the time to sales take-off and its variability across countries brings significant managerial benefits for international marketing strategies. These benefits include better allocation of investment and marketing resources to manufacturing, distribution, pricing, promotions and inventory management. Better understanding of take-off timing aids man- agement of the transition from introductory to growth stage, enhancing the commercial success of the innovation. The literature on sales take-off has primarily focussed on the determinants of cross-country differences; studies are descriptive in nature (see Golder & Tellis 1997) and show the association between socio-economic and cultural variables and take-off times without causal International Journal of Research in Marketing xxx (2017) xxx–xxx ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail address: islam@uoguelph.ca (T. Islam). IJRM-01236; No of Pages 14 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijresmar.2017.12.003 0167-8116/© 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect IJRM International Journal of Research in Marketing journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ijresmar Please cite this article as: Islam, T., & Meade, N., The direct and indirect effects of economic wealth on time to take-off, International Journal of Research in Marketing (2017), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijresmar.2017.12.003