Abstract:

Successful new product development is an important factor for enterprise to gain competitive advantages, but the diffusion of most new products often ends in failure because the innovative products are not always accepted by the market. Therefore, the industry and academia have conducted a lot of explorations on the issue of new product adoption. New product adoption refers to the process of innovative products from being designed and manufactured to being recognized and adopted by consumers or potential consumers. This paper explores the essential causes of consumers’ new products adoption and the influencing factors of these causes from the perspective of consumers. Through literature review, we find that although many influencing factors such as consumer characteristics and product characteristics have been discussed in the past research on consumers’ adoption of new products, the root reasons have not been discovered. There is also a lack of an overall review of research on consumers’ new product adoption from the perspective of consumers. Therefore, this paper uses the Rogers’ innovation diffusion model as the theoretical basis and extracts the three fundamental reasons for consumers’ new product adoption: innovativeness, product understanding, and susceptibility according to the differences in adoption time and characteristics of adopters. We use this as an analysis framework to further explore the key factors affecting these three fundamental reasons.
The innovations of this paper are as follows:
Previous research mainly analyzed consumers' new product adoption behavior from different aspects such as consumer characteristics, product characteristics, or social influence. Although the research was comprehensive, it failed to explore the fundamental reasons for consumers’ adoption of new products. Our research proposes to systematically explore the root causes of new product adoption from the consumer’s perspective. We extract three essential reasons namely innovativeness, product understanding, and susceptibility for the first time, and construct the research framework based on this.
Previous literature mainly divided consumers into early adopters and late adopters based on the adoption time of new products and the characteristics of adopters without analyzing the mechanism. Our research uses the Roger’s innovation diffusion model as the theoretical basis to make a preliminary distinction between adopters. We expound the essential reasons why consumers become early adopters and late adopters of new products from three aspects: innovativeness, product understanding, and susceptibility.
We also sort out and summarize the influencing factors of consumers’ new products adoption in detail under the framework based on the three aspects of consumer innovativeness, product understanding, and susceptibility. Previous studies rarely considered these three essential reasons, but mainly discussed in isolation from the aspects of consumer characteristics and product characteristics.
Through analysis, it is concluded that early adopters have high innovativeness, high product understanding, and low susceptibility; while late adopters have low innovativeness, low product understanding, and high susceptibility. We also further explore the specific factors influencing consumers’ new products adoption in various dimensions. Future research can be expanded from these three dimensions, combining the deficiencies of existing research, the current environment, and consumption characteristics.

Key words: new product adoption, adopter, innovativeness, product understanding, susceptibility