Look Before You Leap--Broadening the Understanding of Consumer Resistance to Radical nnovations

摘要

This paper examines the barriers preventing consumers from adopting radically new products. To broaden the understanding of consumer resistance we conducted a multi-method qualitative study. Therefore the aim of our paper is twofold: In order to create deeper insights into consumer refusal of innovations, we first investigate consumers' perception of an innovative product and compare our findings with existing literature streams. Thus we gain a better understanding of psychological and functional barriers as sources of resistance. In a second step, we analyze the three forms of resistance, which can appear as expressible attitude or observable behavior as a reaction to innovative products. Our study contributes to consumer behavior literature by introducing the barrier of psychological barrier 'information overload' and the functional barrier 'ecological concerns' based on empirical data.