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Entrenched Knowledge Structures and Consumer Response to New Products
Abstract
Although diffusion models have been successfully used to predict the adoption patterns of new products and technologies, little research has examined the psychological processes underlying the individual consumer's adoption decision. This research uses the knowledge transfer paradigm, studied often in the context of analogies, to demonstrate that both existing knowledge and innovation continuity are major factors influencing the consumer's adoption process. In two experiments, the authors demonstrate that the relationship between expertise and adoption is relatively complex. Specifically their findings indicate that, compared with novices, experts report higher comprehension, more net benefits, and therefore higher preferences for continuous innovations. However, for discontinuous innovations, experts' entrenched knowledge is related to lower comprehension, fewer perceived net benefits, and lower preferences compared with that of novices. Only when this entrenched knowledge is accompanied by relevant information from a supplementary knowledge base are experts able to understand and appreciate discontinuous innovations. These findings have implications for segmentation, media planning, and the creation of product/brand loyalty.
... Next, we build on innovation learning theory to explore a communication strategy that inhibits the initial negativefocused evaluation of self-focused user innovations (Gregan-Paxton & John, 1997; Moreau et al., 2001). Specifically, we propose a "counter-learning presentation sequence" strategy: that is, presenting user innovations' self-focused goals and related key attributes in a sequence counter to adopters' default innovation learning sequences. ...
... Second, our research contributes to the literature on innovation learning (Gregan-Paxton & John, 1997;Moreau et al., 2001). Extant innovation learning theory has been mainly based on firm-designed innovations that are customerfocused and designed to address many potential adopters' needs/wants. ...
... Extant innovation learning theory has been mainly based on firm-designed innovations that are customerfocused and designed to address many potential adopters' needs/wants. As such, adopters' initial attitudes towards the innovations are often positive; hence, pro-learning presentation sequences that match adopters' default innovation learning sequences improve adoption (Moreau et al., 2001). Our research shows that communicating user innovations' self-focus triggers adopters' first-negative-then-positive evaluations. ...
Each year, millions of user inventors spend billions of dollars creating innovations for their own use and to satisfy their own needs. Many user entrepreneurs also commercialize their user innovations to the mass market to benefit others and generate financial return. However, because user innovations are inherently self-focused, they often fail to achieve adoption in the mass market, leading to significant social welfare losses. Extant research suggests deploying customer-focused design modifications to improve the diffusion of user innovations. As an alternative to this customer-focused perspective, the authors propose a novel communication strategy that evokes adopters’ creativity to increase adoption. In particular, presenting user innovations’ self-focused goals and related key attributes in a sequence that mismatches adopters’ default innovation learning sequences can evoke adopters’ creative thinking regarding the self-relevance of the user innovations, and in turn enhances adoption. Furthermore, deploying self-focused, user inventor solo (vs. customer-focused, open customer participation) enhancement strategy sustains (vs. attenuates) the proposed effects.
... New products in the context of this research denote products for which established alternatives exist in the same category. What differentiates these new products is that they may provide a benefit over the established alternatives that may come at the (perceived) cost of a required change (e.g., in terms of product usage behavior/habits; Heidenreich & Kraemer, 2015;Moreau et al., 2001). Research on consumer buying behavior reveals that with increasing age, a tendency to prefer established product alternatives at the expense of such new alternatives in a given product category emerges (Lambert-Pandraud et al., 2005;Laukkanen et al., 2007). ...
For firms facing an aging society, substantial adoption gaps that often exist for new product alternatives between older and younger consumers pose a significant challenge. To examine the root cause of this phenomenon, our research draws on life‐span theory and is based empirically on a set of studies involving 2050 participants in both field and controlled settings. As a first contribution, we show that, in contrast to growth‐oriented younger consumers, older consumers exhibit lower levels of novelty seeking because of their relatively higher prioritization of maintenance goals. This predisposition leads older consumers to perceive the inconvenience induced by the possible behavior change associated with purchasing new (vs. established) products in a given category as more salient than potential benefit gains. In comparison, younger consumers perceive benefit gains to be more salient. For established product alternatives with familiar benefits, there is no such clear age‐related difference. As a second contribution, we propose easy‐to‐implement adaptations of the communication strategy to address this issue, and we examine the effectiveness of these adaptations in a field study at the point‐of‐purchase. Specifically, since prevention‐framed (vs. promotion‐framed) claims are more compatible with older consumers' maintenance orientation, they can increase the salience of benefit gains over behavior change for new product alternatives and foster older consumers' product‐related information behaviors and new product consideration. These results have important implications for researchers and managers as they refine the understanding of older consumers' acceptance of new products.
... Future researchers face the challenge of disentangling scarcity-induced vs. normal waiting time in real-world scenarios. Additionally, advancements in understanding individual utility functions have been significant, with concepts like hubs, influencers (Iyengar et al., 2011;Van den Bulte & Joshi, 2007), experts (Moreau et al., 2001), and micro-utility-based decision making (Chatterjee & Eliashberg, 1990) contributing to new product diffusion. The agent-based platform allows testing these concepts across multiple data sets, further refining the theory proposed in this paper. ...
Product shortages are known to slow down the diffusion process. However, we counterintuitively theorize and empirically demonstrate that under specific conditions of social influence, the diffusion process may be accelerated by early product scarcity. Using an Agent-Based framework and Genetic Algorithm-based estimation, we analyzed 20 product categories to identify the critical trade-off influencing diffusion: the interplay of the social influence ratio of waiting customers to adopters, the external influence, and level of product scarcity. Strategic managerial actions can accelerate the adoption of products. For example, in the case of fitness trackers, we were able to simulate speed-up by up to two years compared to the standard Bass model. Importantly, we introduce a novel framework to study competition dynamics, analyzing how the timing of market entry and the production capacity of competitors, along with the initial installed capacity of the pioneering firm affect diffusion speed. This acceleration, whether due to managerial foresight or serendipity, necessitates careful orchestration to harness the enthusiasm of waiting customers and strategically allocate marketing spending on social media platforms, thereby differentially amplifying the influence of adopters and potential customers.
... To check the effectiveness of the manipulations, we assessed perceived product sustainability, credibility and innovativeness using established Likert scales (1 = strongly disagree, 7 = strongly agree). The scales were adapted from Lee (2020) and Gershoff and Frels (2015) for sustainability, MacKenzie and Lutz (1989) for credibility, and Lee and O'Connor (2003) and Moreau et al. (2001) for innovativeness, all with Cronbach's alpha >.84 (Gliem & Gliem, 2003). Additionally, we used four 7-point Likert scale items to check the realism of the scenarios (Dabholkar & Bagozzi, 2002) and one item ('This product is totally new to me') to ensure the participants were unfamiliar with the product (Heidenreich et al., 2016). ...
The urgency to launch sustainable innovations rapidly in competitive markets increases the risk of greenwashing, as companies may overstate their products' environmental benefits. This article sheds light on the potential repercussions of deceptive sustainability claims within the realm of product innovations. Using four scenario‐based experiments, this study reveals that exposure of greenwashing damages brand perception, a critical factor in the diffusion of innovations, even more than if products lacked green attributes at all. Findings from mediation analyses reveal that these reactions stem from negative disconfirmations, arising from a perceived discrepancy between expected sustainability and quality beliefs and the product's failure to meet these expectations. Moreover, this research deepens our understanding of greenwashing by providing the first empirical evidence that the intensity and focus of greenwashing activities on core components of product innovations significantly exacerbate the adverse effects. Overall, our study not only replicates findings on the detrimental effects of greenwashing in product innovation contexts but also advances the theoretical understanding by identifying the psychological processes behind these effects and their variations with greenwashing intensity and focus. In doing so, results advocate for a shift from a one‐dimensional, uniformly perspective to a more nuanced understanding of the interplay between greenwashing intensity and focus on consumer responses. From a practical perspective, the results underscore the risks of greenwashing in sustainable innovation contexts and emphasize the crucial role of transparency and authenticity in sustainability claims.
This study investigates how consumers’ information-seeking motivation and perceptions of cross-media campaigns influence their attitudes toward innovative products. Drawing from the perspective of interactive marketing, it highlights the role of consumer–brand interaction in shaping product evaluation and acceptance. The findings indicate that when consumers perceive a product as highly innovative, they tend to experience both curiosity and uncertainty. This activates their need for information-seeking, which subsequently increases their engagement with cross-media campaigns designed with interactive marketing elements. Through this process, consumers develop more favorable attitudes toward the product. The results also reveal a significant dual mediation effect between perceived innovativeness and product attitude, mediated by the need for information-seeking and perception of cross-media campaigns. Although each path may not independently reach significance, the combined sequential mechanism—where consumers actively explore and interact with brand content—plays a critical role in shaping product attitudes.
Purpose
This research delves into the nuanced effects of positive goal framing quantity in advertising on consumer reactions towards new products, categorizing them into incrementally new products (INPs) and really new products (RNPs). It moves beyond the traditional binary evaluation of advertising effectiveness, offering a more intricate analysis of consumer engagement based on product novelty.
Design/methodology/approach
Employing a comprehensive dataset encompassing 461 digital video advertisements from six leading technology-centric firms, this study employs content analysis alongside hierarchical polynomial regression to dissect the dynamics between the volume of positive goal framings and consumer engagements. This examination is contextualized within the spectrum of product innovation, offering insights into the differential consumer behaviors elicited by INPs and RNPs.
Findings
The investigation uncovers a non-linear, inverted U-shaped correlation between the volume of positive goal framings and consumer responses. This relationship exhibits variability in its intensity between INPs and RNPs, with INPs demonstrating a more pronounced response variability around a higher inflection point on the curve. This pattern underscores the complex interplay between goal framing and product novelty in shaping consumer perceptions and actions.
Originality/value
This study pioneers the exploration of goal framing within the realm of product advertising, shifting the analytical lens from its traditional roots in health and medicine to the intricacies of consumer behavior in response to advertising. By introducing a distinctive classification of product newness through INPs and RNPs, the research augments current understanding of effective advertising strategies, delivering profound insights for marketers and advertisers in tailoring their campaigns to align with consumer expectations and product characteristics.
The fast fashion industry rapidly introduces new products, making early adoption among fashion innovators crucial for sustaining return on investment and setting fashion trends for the diffusion process. This study aims to identify fashion innovators by assessing their learning maturity and to determine the optimal timing for commercializing fashion new arrivals. By leveraging large-scale e-commerce data, we operationalized learning maturity based on customers' past purchase experiences and employed survival analyses to examine how different types of customer learning affect new product adoption across various times of the day and days of the week. Our findings reveal that learning about product features increases customers' likelihood of adopting new products, whereas learning about pricing decreases it. These learning effects are most pronounced for customers shopping at bedtime and on weekends due to variations in consumers’ cognitive resources. By demonstrating the significant effects of customer learning, this research uncovers new, time-varying, experience-based antecedents of new product adoption. Our results provide novel insights into the success of new fashion products, offering readily actionable guidance on targeting the right customers at the right time.
Much creative work takes place in groups or teams, but also individual creative efforts cannot be seen as separate from a social context. In recent decades, the questions “What makes groups and teams creative?” and “How is creativity shaped by the social context?” have therefore received increasing research attention. This book provides a comprehensive overview of this work and is organized into five sections. After an introductory section, a second section (individuals and groups) discusses issues of group composition, diversity, newcomers, and conflict. The third section, on basic processes and theoretical approaches, discusses cognitive, motivational, and affective processes in groups as they relate to group creativity and provides theoretical approaches to group creativity based on information-processing theory, social identity theory, network theories, and decision-making theories. The fourth section focuses on the (social) context in which group creativity takes place and examines the role of norms and culture, the organizational context, and technology. The final section offers practical applications in terms of effective brainstorming, the role of leadership, and how group creativity plays a role in industry, science, and the arts. This Handbook of Group Creativity not only summarizes the state-of-the-science in group creativity research but also offers many suggestions on how this blossoming field may further develop and on how group creativity may be stimulated in practice.
When we encounter a new problem, we are often reminded of similar problems solved earlier and may use the solution procedure from an old problem to solve a new one. Such analogical transfer, however, has been difficult to demonstrate empirically, even within a single experimental session. This article proposes a framework for conceptualizing analogical problem solving that can account for the conflicting findings in the literature. In addition, the framework leads to two predictions concerning the transfer behavior of experts and novices. These predictions concern both positive and negative transfer and are based on the different types of features included in the problem representations of experts and novices. First, when two problems share structural features but not surface features, spontaneous positive transfer should be more likely in experts than in novices. Second, when two problems share surface but not structural features, spontaneous negative transfer should be stronger for novices than for experts. These predictions were supported by the results of three experiments involving college students solving a complex arithmetic word problem.
New product ideation might be improved by identifying and applying certain well-defined schemes derived from an historical analysis of product-based trends, termed "templates." These templates might contribute to the understanding and prediction of new product emergence. The authors derive templates in a study that maps the evolution of product changes by adapting a set of intrinsic operations originally designed to uncover hidden logical patterns in technological inventions. They find that the majority of new product versions can be accounted for by as few as five templates. The authors define the five templates and show that they derive from six elementary (first principle) operators. A procedure for using the dominant template, termed "Attribute Dependency," is outlined, followed by a report of two experiments examining its usefulness in the context of product ideation.
Categorizations which humans make of the concrete world are not arbitrary but highly determined. In taxonomies of concrete objects, there is one level of abstraction at which the most basic category cuts are made. Basic categories are those which carry the most information, possess the highest category cue validity, and are, thus, the most differentiated from one another. The four experiments of Part I define basic objects by demonstrating that in taxonomies of common concrete nouns in English based on class inclusion, basic objects are the most inclusive categories whose members: (a) possess significant numbers of attributes in common, (b) have motor programs which are similar to one another, (c) have similar shapes, and (d) can be identified from averaged shapes of members of the class. The eight experiments of Part II explore implications of the structure of categories. Basic objects are shown to be the most inclusive categories for which a concrete image of the category as a whole can be formed, to be the first categorizations made during perception of the environment, to be the earliest categories sorted and earliest named by children, and to be the categories most codable, most coded, and most necessary in language.
Similarity and analogy are fundamental in human cognition. They are crucial for recognition and classification, and have been associated with scientific discovery and creativity. Successful learning is generally less dependent on the memorization of isolated facts and abstract rules than it is on the ability to identify relevant bodies of knowledge already stored as the starting point for new learning. Similarity and analogy play an important role in this process - a role that in recent years has received much attention from cognitive scientists. Any adequate understanding of similarity and analogy requires the integration of theory and data from diverse domains. This interdisciplinary volume explores current developments in research and theory from psychological, computational, and educational perspectives, and considers their implications for learning and instruction. Well-known cognitive scientists examine the psychological processes involved in reasoning by similarity and analogy, the computational problems encountered in simulating analogical processing in problem solving, and the conditions promoting the application of analogical reasoning in everyday situations.
Similarity and analogy are fundamental in human cognition. They are crucial for recognition and classification, and have been associated with scientific discovery and creativity. Successful learning is generally less dependent on the memorization of isolated facts and abstract rules than it is on the ability to identify relevant bodies of knowledge already stored as the starting point for new learning. Similarity and analogy play an important role in this process - a role that in recent years has received much attention from cognitive scientists. Any adequate understanding of similarity and analogy requires the integration of theory and data from diverse domains. This interdisciplinary volume explores current developments in research and theory from psychological, computational, and educational perspectives, and considers their implications for learning and instruction. Well-known cognitive scientists examine the psychological processes involved in reasoning by similarity and analogy, the computational problems encountered in simulating analogical processing in problem solving, and the conditions promoting the application of analogical reasoning in everyday situations.
New product ideation might be improved by identifying and applying certain well-defined schemes derived from an historical analysis of product-based trends, termed “templates.” These templates might contribute to the understanding and prediction of new product emergence. The authors derive templates in a study that maps the evolution of product changes by adapting a set of intrinsic operations originally designed to uncover hidden logical patterns in technological inventions. They find that the majority of new product versions can be accounted for by as few as five templates. The authors define the five templates and show that they derive from six elementary (first principle) operators. A procedure for using the dominant template, termed “Attribute Dependency,” is outlined, followed by a report of two experiments examining its usefulness in the context of product ideation.
Conceptual features differ in how mentally tranformable they are. A robin that does not eat is harder to imagine than a robin that does not chirp. We argue that features are immutable to the extent that they are central In a network of dependency relations. The immutability of a feature reflects how much the internal structure of a concept depends on that feature; i.e., how much the feature contributes to the concept's coherence. Complementarily, mutability reflects the aspects in which a concept is flexible. We show that features can be reliably ordered according to their mutability using tasks that require people to conceive of objects missing a feature, and that mutability (conceptual centrality) can be distinguished from category centrality and from diagnosticity and salience. We test a model of mutability based on asymmetric, unlabeled, pairwise dependency relations. With no free parameters, the model provides reasonable fits to data, Qualitative tests of the model show that mutability judgments are unaffected by the type of dependency relation and that dependency structure influences judgments of variability.
In their search for the keys to successful product innovation, product managers and researchers typically focus on trying to identify the most effective organizational processes, strategies, and structures. Surprisingly, little or no effort is directed toward understanding the process that consumers use for evaluating an innovation. By gaining insight into this evaluation process, a firm can present an innovative product in a more effective manner and thus increase the likelihood that consumers will respond favorably to the innovation. Richard W. Olshavsky and Richard A. Spreng provide insight into this process by describing the results of an experiment in which subjects were asked to evaluate several innovative concepts. From their observations, they develop a model of the detailed information-processing steps that these consumers employed in order to evaluate the new products. Consistent with previous research, they found that judgment was the predominant evaluation strategy, particularly for the most innovative concepts. Various subjects also used a categorization strategy, though none used categorization for more than four of the nine concepts that were evaluated. Contrary to expectations, none of the evaluations relied solely on the manufacturer's reputation or the recommendation of a friend. In a simplified model of the evaluation process, when presented with an innovative concept, consumers first attempt to categorize the product. In other words, an innovation may be rejected simply because consumers somehow link it to an existing category that has a negative connotation. If consumers cannot categorize the product, they then employ a judgment process based on some evaluative criteria. Based on the data collected in this study, this simplified model is extended to include four other cognitive processes that strongly influence the evaluation process: forming evaluative criteria, forming expectations about the innovative concept, assessing satisfaction with an old product, and comparing the new and old products. When faced with a highly innovative concept, consumers may find it difficult to form their own evaluative criteria and expectations concerning that innovation. Consequently, managers may have an opportunity to shape the judgment process by educating consumers about the appropriate evaluative criteria or by clearly communicating the product's attributes, benefits, and appropriate use.
This research uses innovation characteristics to assess product potential at two points in time. The two phases of the study consist of: (1) proposing and estimating purchase intention models and (2) reconciling predicted success with actual product performance. The investigation focuses on the impact of perceived product attributes, environmental variables, and consumer traits on the purchase intention of actual innovations within several technologically intensive product categories. Differences in model specification and parameter values are noted across product types. Results indicate consistency in the impact of product attributes across categories on an innovation's acceptability, but suggest differences in model specification with respect to environmental variables and consumer traits. The existence of a generic-to-specialized innovation continuum is a possible cause of the heterogeneity in results across products. An ex post analysis of the innovations indicates that, while success can be predicted quite accurately using perceived product attribute ratings, consumer and environmental variables should not be ignored for particular categories. The study has implications for the early screening of innovative durables, specifically with respect to forecasting model potential, determining product design and positioning, and developing promotional messages.