Incidental curiosity and consumer intention to obtain unknown information: Implications for new product adoption and self-tracking behaviour

Curiosity has a powerful influence on consumer behaviour, and previous research has tended to focus on how curiosity affects the desire to obtain curiosity-relevant, unknown information. Yet an interesting question, which was the focus of the present research, concerns the effect of incidental curiosity on intention to obtain curiosity-irrelevant, unknown information. A set of three experiments provided systematic support for the hypotheses that incidental curiosity will increase the intention to obtain curiosity-irrelevant, unknown information (both product-related and self-related) in a way that is serially mediated by the perceived value of curiosity-relevant, unknown information and the perceived value of curiosity-irrelevant, unknown information. As such, this research offers important theoretical contributions to the literatures on curiosity and information ignorance, and it has implications for new product adoption and self-tracking behaviour.

A review on the concept of consumer innovativeness

Beginning in the 1970s, academia began to study consumer innovation and used it as an important indicator for predicting consumers’ new product adoption behavior. This article makes a more comprehensive summary and evaluation of the definition of consumer innovation from three aspects (innate innovativeness; special fields innovativeness; actualized innovativeness), summarizes the relationship between the three innovations, and builds a consumer innovation integration model.

Impact of consumer innovativeness on risk and new product adoption: a moderating role of Indonesia’s demographic factors

Consumer innovativeness is an important driver of economic progress and a country’s position in global competition. This study aims to examine the moderating effect of demographic factors of Indonesian consumers on the impact of consumer innovativeness on perceived risk and new product adoption. The type of research chosen is a causal comparative study by using online and offline survey methods. Data were obtained from a sample of 1,000 consumers from 31 provinces. The results showed that the demographic variable became a moderating variable for the impact of consumer innovativeness on new product adoption, but did not play a role in the influence of consumer innovativeness on credit-purchase risk perception. With regard to the influence of consumer innovativeness on credit-purchase risk perception, only social class has a significant effect as a moderating variable. As for the effect of consumer innovativeness on a new product adoption, the variables of marital status, occupation, income, and social class have significant effects. The social class variable consistently becomes a moderating one in both equations. The results of this study are useful for marketers to focus more specifically on their target markets, especially on the diffusion of new product innovations based on demographic characteristics. AcknowledgmentPDUPT Research Grant by Ministry of Research and Technology of The Republic of Indonesia, 2019.

Strong Anxiety Boosts New Product Adoption When Hope Is Also Strong

New products can evoke anticipatory emotions such as hope and anxiety. On the one hand, consumers might hope that innovative offerings will produce goal-congruent outcomes; on the other hand, they might also be anxious about possible outcomes that are goal-incongruent. The authors demonstrate the provocative and counterintuitive finding that strong anxiety about potentially goal-incongruent outcomes from a new product actually enhances (vs. weakens) consequential adoption intentions (Study 1) and actual adoption (Studies 2 and 3) when hope is also strong. The authors test action planning (a form of elaboration) and perceived control over outcomes as serial mediators to explain this effect. They find that the proposed mechanism holds even after they consider alternative explanations, including pain/gain inferences, confidence in achieving goal-congruent outcomes, global elaboration, affective forecasts, and motivated reasoning. Managerially, the findings suggest that when bringing a new product to market, new product adoption may be greatest when hope and anxiety are both strong. The findings also point to ways in which marketers might enhance hope and/or anxiety, and they suggest that the use of potentially anxiety-inducing tactics such as disclaimers in ads and on packages might not deter adoption when hope is also strong.

Cross-Platform Spillover Effects in Consumption of Viral Content: A Quasi-Experimental Analysis Using Synthetic Controls

To inform product release and distribution strategies, research has analyzed cross-market spillovers in new product adoption. However, models that examine these effects for digital and viral media are still evolving. Given resistance to advertising, firms often seek to promote their own viral content to boost brand awareness. However, a key shortcoming of virality is its ephemeral nature. To gain insight into sustaining virality, we develop a quasi-experimental approach that estimates the backward spillover onto a focal platform by introducing a piece of content onto a new platform. We posit that introducing content to the audience of a new platform can generate word of mouth, which may affect its consumption within an earlier platform. We estimate these spillovers using data on 381 viral videos on 26 platforms (e.g., YouTube, Vimeo) and observe how consumption of videos on an initial “lead” platform is affected by their subsequent introduction onto “lag” platforms. This spillover is estimated as follows: for each multiplatform video, we compare its view growth after being introduced onto a new platform to that of a synthetic control based on similar single-platform videos. Analysis of 275 such spillover scenarios reveals that introducing a video onto a lag platform roughly doubles its subsequent view growth in the lead platform. This positive cross-platform spillover is persistent, bursty, and strongest in the first 42 days. We find that spillover is boosted when the video is consumed more in the lag platform, when the consumption rate peaks earlier in the lag platform, and when the lag platform targets a foreign market. Our findings suggest that firms can sustain the popularity of their viral content by introducing it onto additional platforms (e.g., Vimeo) after posting it on a focal platform (e.g., YouTube). As a result of their posting on the latter platforms, firms can expect subsequent view growth on the focal platform to roughly double. The aforementioned benefits persists for up to five lag platforms. Platforms should also consider that a positive cross-platform spillover may help platforms reinforce each other’s usage, rather than cannibalize each other.