Effects of lead-usership on the acceptance of media innovations: A mobile augmented reality case

摘要

Lead-users are ahead of important trends, which makes them valuable resources when it comes to generate ideas for new products in the early stages of a company's new product development process. In later stages - e.g. just before market entry when prototypes of the new products are available and can be tested - the company's market research usually focuses on average users or representative samples of users since their measured acceptance of the prototypes can be used to predict sales volumes or market shares. However, in the media industry, prototypes of new products are often made publically available as alpha or beta versions and may especially attract high shares of lead-users for testing. In this paper we analyze the potential effects of these biased samples on the prediction of sales volumes or market shares. A sample of lead-users and other users tests the prototype of a mobile augmented reality app. Then, the acceptance of this media innovation is measured applying a lead-usership extended version of the UTAUT2 model. Our results show that behavioral intention and the effects of influencing factors substantially differ between lead-users and other users. We argue that knowing these differences can help to reduce risks of biased prediction of sales volumes or market shares.