Introduction to the Special Issue on Consumer Response to Big Innovations

Abstract

Previous articleNext article FreeConsumer Response to Big InnovationsIntroduction to the Special Issue on Consumer Response to Big InnovationsPage Moreau and Stacy WoodPage Moreau Search for more articles by this author and Stacy Wood Search for more articles by this author Page Moreau ([email protected]) is the John R. Nevin Chair in Marketing at the Wisconsin School of Business, University of Wisconsin–Madison. Stacy Wood ([email protected]) is the J. Lloyd Langdon Distinguished University Chair in Marketing, and Executive Director, Consumer Innovation Collaborative, at North Carolina State’s Poole College of Management.PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThe Greek philosopher Heraclitus famously said, “change is the only constant in life.” Perhaps, then, it is no surprise that humans have developed many and complex means of responding to change—in strategies both to leverage novel benefits and to cope with the costs of flux. Nowhere are these means more apparent than in today’s marketplace where consumers face a multitude of major innovations. Technology, cultural shifts, and social systems have created rapid changes in new products, new services, new channels, and even new economies. The diffusion of innovation is accelerated by greater information accessibility and social visibility. On the horizon, consumers can see sea changes in innovative domains such as the Internet of Things (IoT), sharing economies, tele-health and digital health care, smart/connected products (wearables, smart fabrics, etc.), self-driving cars, and user-generated content/influence (blogs, Twitter, etc.).This volume of JACR focuses on “Consumer Response to Big Innovations,” a topic that marketing academics have been studying since Frank Bass published his seminal article “A New Product Growth Model for Consumer Durables” 50 years ago in Management Science (Bass 1969). This article, which introduced the Bass model, has been cited well over 8,500 times and has offered countless insights into the factors influencing aggregate innovation adoption patterns across a wide range of product categories. To build his model, Bass added mathematical theory to Everett Rogers’s groundbreaking sociological work detailed in the book Diffusion of Innovations (1962), which has become the second-most-cited book in the social sciences (second only to Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions).Around the same time, scholars in consumer behavior also recognized the importance of Rogers’s diffusion perspective for marketing (e.g., Silk 1966; Arndt 1967; Robertson 1967), but following an initial flurry of research activity, interest in the topic waned among behavioral researchers. Gatignon and Robertson (1985) referred to this as a “current malaise in consumer diffusion research” and advanced a conceptual model and theoretical propositions designed to reinvigorate research on the topic. It worked. Consumer researchers have now been examining consumers’ product adoption decisions at the individual level for over 30 years. However, what we thought were radical and “really new” product changes in the past seem more incremental in the face of the sea changes described in our opening paragraph. This volume of JACR offers a range of articles to address these more fundamental shifts in the innovation landscape and how consumers respond to them.How Consumers Respond when Technology changes what it is to be humanAs documented in Rogers’s Diffusion of Innovations (1962), consumers’ perceptions of prior product adopters have a significant influence on their own adoption decisions. In other words, from our observations of or discussions with earlier adopters, we gain information that will help inform our own decisions. The first article, “Human or Robot? Consumer Responses to Radical Cognitive Enhancement Products” by Noah Castelo, Bernd Schmitt, and Miklos Sarvary, exa