A re‐evaluation of the product innovation‐decision process: the implications for product management
| Pages | 35-47 |
| Published date | 01 October 1995 |
| Date | 01 October 1995 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/10610429510097681 |
| Author | Madhavan Parthasarathy,Terri L. Rittenburg,A. Dwayne Ball |
| Subject Matter | Marketing |
JOURNAL OF PRODUCT & BRAND MANAGEMENT VOL. 4 NO. 4 1995 pp. 35-47 © MCB UNIVERSITY PRESS 1061-0421 35
Over the past several years, an area that has justly attracted voluminous
research by consumer behavior scholars is individual decision making.
Within the sub-field of diffusion of innovations, this has been reflected in
numerous innovation-decision (sometimes called adoption-decision) models
that have surfaced in the literature in the past four decades.
Innovation-decision models have been useful because they trace the process
that individuals go through before making a decision as to whether to adopt
an innovation, much like their cousins in the buyer behavior literature. In
fact, since, as Parthasarathy et al. (1994) indicate, purchase often has been
used as a proxy for adoption in diffusion studies within marketing, any study
of the adoption-decision process (including this one) can be meaningfully
extended to the behavioral decision environment.
This, in turn, has a direct impact on strategies for product introduction,
branding, and ongoing product management.
Existing innovation-decision models, however, invariably assume that an
individual goes through a sequence of steps or “stages” that parallel
awareness, information collection, and information evaluation before a
decision to adopt is made. That is, it is presumed that an individual actively
seeks out information about a product and then, based on his or her existing
predispositions (affect), decides whether the product is suited to his or her
needs.
This contention is supported by the fact that adoption models are inevitably
based on the traditional learning-oriented, high-involvement, “think-feel-do”
hierarchy-of-effects model (Barry, 1987; Batra and Ray, 1986; Gatignon and
Robertson, 1985).
We contend that this approach is unnecessarily limiting because it has been
shown that most adopters are “imitators” who rely largely on interpersonal
interactions before making an adoption decision (e.g. Barnett, 1953;
Granovetter, 1973; Lekvall and Wahlbin, 1973; Rogers, 1983; Yapa and
Mayfield, 1978). Rogers (1983), for example, states:
Most individuals evaluate an innovation, not on the basis of scientific research by
experts, but through the subjective evaluation of near-peers who have adopted the
innovation. These near-peers thus serve as social models, whose innovation
behavior tends to be imitated by others in the social system (p. 36).
In fact, researchers have recognized that interpersonal communication is
often the most important source of information and influence (e.g. Anglin,
1989; Arndt, 1967; Feldman and Spencer, 1965; Grossbart et al., 1978; Katz
A re-evaluation of the product
innovation-decision process:
the implications for product
management
Madhavan Parthasarathy, Terri L. Rittenburg and
A. Dwayne Ball
Sequence of steps
Numerous innovation-
decision models
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