Introduction


Shopping and buying on the Internet can be viewed as a 'new product' and therefore is an area to which diffusion of innovations theory can apply (Rangaswamy and Gupta, 1999). The successful diffusion of new products is a perennial goal of marketing management. Consumer and market researchers have helped marketing practice in this regard by pursuing several avenues of theory and research. One approach has been to study and to improve the new product development process (e.g., Cooper, 2001). A second approach focuses on improving the marketing of new products (e.g., Mohr, 2001). A third approach describes the influence other people have on spreading new ideas, practices, and products (e.g., Gladwell, 2000; Keller and Berry, 2003). Finally, a large body of research has focused on the personal characteristics of consumers that influence their acceptance of new products, on the presumption that understanding the personality, motives, and attitudes of consumers leads to better new product marketing and, hence, successful diffusion (Gatignon and Robertson, 1991, p. 320). One of the personal characteristics of consumers that plays an important role in the adoption decision process is innovativeness .

Rogers (1995, p. 252) used the term 'innovativeness' to describe 'the degree to which an individual or other unit of adoption is relatively earlier in adopting new ideas than other members of a system,' and based his typology (innovators, early adopters, early and late majority, and laggards) on it. However, as Dowling (1999, p. 113) points out: 'This is a time- and behaviour-based definition as opposed to a trait- or attitude-based definition.' The latter approach argues that time-of-adoption is the behavior one wants to explain using other constructs (Midgley and Dowling, 1978), and one of these constructs is innovativeness , which can be described as a trait-attitudinal disposition to adopt innovations (Dowling, 1999, p. 114) or as a willingness to try new things (Hurt, Joseph, and Cook, 1977). Thus, several authors argue that innovativeness is an individual difference trait that leads people to adopt new things (Hirschman, 1980; Manning, Bearden, and Madden, 1995) and that it is permissible to think of a trait that we can term consumer innovativeness (Dowling, 1999, p. 111).

Some confusion can arise, however, if one fails to make explicit the 'level of generality' (Blalock, 1970, p. 92) one has in mind when using the term 'innovativeness.' As Clark and Watson (1995) make clear, many psychological constructs can be proffered to account for a pattern of behavior (such as adoption of new products). One reason for this conceptual abundance is that psychological constructs are ordered hierarchically at different levels of abstraction or breadth (Clark and Watson, 1995). Their example (p. 310) is instructive: 'In the area of personality, for example, one can conceive of the narrow traits of talkativeness and physical expressiveness , the somewhat broader concepts of gregariousness and assertiveness, and the still more general disposition of extraversion.' Thus, to avoid confusion, consumer and market researchers should explicitly state the level of generality they have in mind when invoking innovativeness as a partial explanation for time-of-adoption. Moreover, to better explain and predict how individual differences influence consumers' behavior, the related influence of all levels of a construct should be delineated (Clark and Watson, 1995).

This distinction is important because marketing and consumer behavior researchers as well as managers have long recognized that different consumers react differently to new products. Hence, the segmentation of consumers into adopter groups   la Rogers. Over the years , however, researchers have not successfully capitalized on these adopter groups because of two existing problems. First, researchers had difficulty distinguishing the earliest buyers of new products from innovators. This is due to the fact that not all new product buyers are innovators, and not all innovators buy a specific new product. Innovators make up disproportionately the majority of early buyers for a specific new product. Therefore, it is useful to target this group since they are vital to the subsequent diffusion of the new product. Midgley and Dowling (1978) provided the seminal discussion of this difficulty of distinction and proposed distinguishing innovative consumers based on the individual difference variable 'innovativeness' as a personality-like construct.

The second problem, which had always been inherent in diffusion theory, was that researchers lacked a valid and reliable measure of innovativeness for different levels of generality. Measures of innovativeness at a more global, personality level existed, but they were of little use for managers who need to be able to measure innovativeness for their specific product field. Goldsmith and Hofacker (1991) solved this problem by developing a valid and reliable self-report measure of innovativeness (the DSI) for specific product domains. With these two problems solved , research on new product diffusion could proceed profitably for global innovativeness and domain-specific innovativeness. Another level of generality, marketplace innovativeness, still needs to be explored in greater depth in the future in order to develop reliable and valid measures for this construct.

With the growing popularity of e-commerce as a new forum for buyers and sellers, the purpose of this chapter is to test whether online innovativeness, a domain-specific innovativeness, mediates the influence of global innovativeness on online buying (Figure 15-1). In addition, this study extends earlier research by examining the potential moderating effect of gender on the hypothesized relationships.

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Figure 15-1: A theoretical model of the relationships among the four types of innovativeness

After Goldsmith and Foxall, 2003




Contemporary Research in E-marketing (Vol. 1)
Agility and Discipline Made Easy: Practices from OpenUP and RUP
ISBN: B004V9MS42
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 164

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