How oppositional loyalties resulting from producer–user collaborations reduce new product entry: Examples of online games

Abstract

Instead of technological lock-in effects, oppositional loyalty to a product may emerge from users’ collaborations in the product, which grant consumers emotional experiences with the brand, encourage personal relationships, and provide emotional benefits. Therefore, consumers may limit their allocations of resources to competing new products because they devalue a new offering’s relative product performance and its user and complementary networks. Prior rate of use enhances this devaluating effect, and prior experience deepens the negative effects. In contrast, users with minimal prior experience and low usage rates more easily accept new products. This study tests these predictions in a path analysis with data pertaining to an online game, collected from consumers in cybercafés; the 296 respondents across 191 cybercafés support the hypotheses.