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Abstract

This paper is the third of the series of studies entitled “Innovativeness and Involvement as Determinants of Website Loyalty”, which was designed to test Foxall's [1995. Cognitive styles of consumer initiators. Technovation 15(5), 269–288] style/involvement model in the context of Internet buyer behaviours. This paper aims to demonstrate the theoretical and managerial contributions of Foxall's (1995) style/involvement by reviewing the development of cognitive style studies in past 20 years to show the trend and revisions in research designs, and how the current series of studies can add value to the existing literature. While a considerable body of evidence could only identify the personality profile of the earliest users of innovations [e.g. Foxall, G., Haskins, C.G., 1986. Cognitive style and consumer innovativeness: an empirical test of Kirton's Adaptation–Innovation Theory in the context of food purchasing. European Journal of Marketing 20(3/4), 63–80; Foxall, G.R., Haskins, C.G., 1987. Cognitive style and discontinuous consumption: the case of “healthy eating”. Food Marketing 3(2), 19–35; Goldsmith, R., 1983. Psychographics and new product adoption: an exploratory study. Perceptual and Motor Skills 57, 1071–1076; Goldsmith, R., 1984. Personality characteristics associated with adaption–innovation. Journal of Psychology 117(2), 159–165], Foxall's (1995) style/involvement model well captured the personality files of less-involved adaptors, innovators and more-involved innovators as well as their significantly different use/buying frequency of innovations. Aiming to continue to investigate the cognitive style theories in terms of the innovativeness measurement and consumers’ actual behaviours, Wang et al. [2005a. Innovativeness and involvement as determinants of Website loyalty: a test of the style/involvement model in the context of Internet buying, re-submitted] designed an empirical Website survey and findings confirmed Foxall's (1995) style/involvement model in an Internet buying context; although the former used the Domain Specific Innovativeness (DSI) scale [Goldsmith, R.E., Hofacker, C.F., 1991. Measuring consumer innovativeness. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science 19(3), 209–221], and the latter used the Kirton Adaption/Innovation (KAI) scale [Kirton, M., 1976. Adaptors and innovators—a description and measure. Journal of Applied Psychology 61(5), 622–629]. Comparisons among Wang et al. (2005a) and Foxall's (1995) previous studies [Foxall, G.R., Bhate, S., 1991. Cognitive style, personal involvement and situation as determinants of computer use. Technovation 11(3), 183–199; Foxall, G.R., Bhate, S., 1993a. Cognitive styles and personal involvement of market initiators for ‘healthy’ food brands: implications for adoption theory. Journal of Economic Psychology 14(1), 33–56; Foxall, G.R., Bhate, S., 1993b. Cognitive style and use-innovativeness for applications software in home computing: Implications for new product strategy. Technovation 13(5), 311–325; Foxall, G.R., Pallister, J.G., 1998. Measuring Purchase Decision Involvement for financial services: comparison of the Zaichkowsky and Mittal scale. International Journal of Bank Marketing 16(4/5), 180–194; Szmigin, I., Foxall, G.R., 1999. Styles of cashless consumption. International Review of Retail, Distribution and Consumer Research 9, 349–365; Pallister, J.G., Foxall, G.R., Wang, H.-C., 2005. Consumer innovativeness and product involvement as determinants of purchases of financial services, submitted for publication] in the research design context were summarised so as to investigate why a more significant result was revealed in the former study. Together, this series of studies testing Foxall's (1995) style/involvement model provides a robust foundation for future consumer researches.