Research On The Effect Of Consumer’s Regulatory Focus On Innovation Adoption

Nowadays most companies regard new product development as a strategic priority. According to product life cycle theory, if there is no successful introduction of new products, companies’ market share will eventually shrink sharply with the decline of existing products. Successful new products bring companies large market share, profit growth, positive word-of-mouth and corporate image. However, as a coin has two sides, innovation industry also faces a "nightmare":a large number of new product launches are finally failed. New product marketing activity is like a fulcrum, even slight increase in consumers’ attitude and purchase intention can be significantly expanded to bring companies huge benefits, so companies invest a lot in new product launch and advertising. Yet consumer motivation and underlying process of new product adoption are poorly understood, and the success rate of new products has not been improved. To design effective marketing communication strategies to help consumers better accept and adopt new products becomes a major challenge to innovation academia and industry.Consumer product evaluation and adoption, in essence, is a goal attainment process. According to classical motivation theory, all goal attainment process is constrained by self-regulation. As one of the most important theories in self-regulation literature, regulatory focus theory is widely applied in existing product field, but innovation literature that incorporates this theory is very rare. Even in these very limited literature, regulatory focus is only considered as antecedent of new product adoption and purchase, and the possibility that regulatory focus per se may be aroused by contextual factors such as product innovativeness is negelected. Thus, how to take advantage of the situation-aroused regulatory focus to enhance the effectiveness of marketing communications has not been discussed.Building on regulatory focus theory and regulatory fit theory, the current research explores the the role of regulatory focus in the process of new product adoption. This research uses experiment method and consists of three studies. Study1examines the influence of product innovativeness on consumers’ situational regulatory focus. Specifically, consumers pay more attention to positive product outcomes for incremental new products and decision contexts for incremental new products arouse a situational promotion-focus, whereas consumers pay more attention to negative product outcomes for really new products and decision contexts for really new products arouse a situational prevention-focus. Study2examines the effect of regulatory fit on new product communication outcomes. The empirical results show that when the fit occurring between regulatory framing of the new product advertising message and the situational regulatory focus aroused by the new product can enhance the effectiveness of innovation communications. Specifically, for incremental new products, a promotion-framing message (emphasizing positive outcomes by using the products) leads to consumers’ more positive product attitude and higher purchase intention, in contrast, for really new products, a prevention-framing message (emphasizing negative outcomes to be avoided by using the products) leads to more positive product attitude and higher purchase intention. And the effect of regulatory fit is not influenced by product knowledge and consumer innovativeness. Study1and Study2are conducted using Chinese sample. Since consumers from oriental cultural background are systematically more prevention-focused, while those from western cultural background are more promotion-focused, Study3uses British sample to verify the research conclusions again. Meanwhile, Study3also suggests that product nature does not affect the effect of regulatory fit on communication effectiveness of product innovtions, and more explicitly compare the role of chronic and situational regulatory focus in fitting with the message framing of new product ads. The results of this research provide managerial implications for marketing communications of product innovations.