Research Article
An Integrated Model of Acceptance and Resistance to New Products
Published: January 2007 · Vol. 36 No. 7 · pp. 1811-1841
Full Text
Abstract
A review of most existing research literature on new products reveals that the focus has primarily been on adoption and diffusion. The reasons for this focus on adoption and diffusion can be attributed to researchers' pro-innovation bias and their prejudice in classifying late adopters as slow or laggards. However, despite researchers' innovation-oriented thinking, the fact that the majority of new products actually fail in the market demonstrates that researchers with pro-innovation tendencies have maintained an excessively optimistic stance toward new product market entry. New products present consumers with change and uncertainty, and consumer resistance to such change and uncertainty can be considered a normal consumer response. Therefore, from a firm's perspective, understanding consumers' resistance psychology and developing measures to overcome it is a critically important task. Accordingly, this study attempts to integrate consumer resistance variables into the existing Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), thereby proposing an integrated model of acceptance and resistance toward new products. Through this, the primary purpose of this study is to provide marketers with a balanced perspective on acceptance and resistance, thereby broadening the understanding of consumer behavior. Additionally, to validate the proposed research model, it was applied to the case of mobile internet services to empirically analyze how consumer resistance affects the adoption and diffusion of new products.
