Time Of Adoption Research Articles

Consumer Innovativeness : The Mediating Role of Leading Edge Status (LES) on Adoption of Innovative Products in Indian Rural Markets

Consumer innovativeness has recently caught the attention of Indian marketing academics due to rapid adoption of high tech products and services like laptop computers, tablets, DVDs, mobile phones, and cable TV providers. Companies are spending heavily on brand promotion and advertising to attract new customers. This research paper studied consumer innovativeness and lead user status (LUS) in adopting new products and services in Indian rural markets. Lead users are defined as customers at the leading edge of the market and who have a high incentive to adopt a new innovation. In earlier research studies, a construct like 'lead user status' was developed as a bimodal and discrete variable. This paper advanced the idea of lead user through redefining and validating the construct as a leading edge status (LES) and adapting the same to the Indian rural market context as a continuous variable. This helped in comparing LES with other behavioural adoption traits like individual dispositional innovativeness (IDI) and time of adoption (TOA) from the seminal work of Rogers (1962). This paper also studied the mediating effect of LES with the traditional measures like IDI, TOA, and other general characteristics by application of route path analysis in LISREL. A pairwise correlation also revealed interesting patterns among LES, IDI, and TOA and with demographic and psychographic consumer traits. The study validated a continuous construct of LES and further established that LES assumed a mediating role in explaining consumer innovativeness and adoption behaviour.

The nature of lead users and measurement of leading edge status

“Lead users” are defined as being at the leading edge of markets, and as having a high incentive to innovate. Empirical research has shown the value of lead user need and solution data to new product development processes. However, the nature of the lead user construct itself has not been studied to date. In this paper we fill this significant gap by proposing and evaluating a continuous analog to the lead user construct, which we call leading edge status (LES). We establish the validity and reliability of LES and examine the characteristics of users having high levels of this variable. We also offer a first exploration of how LES is related to traditional measures in diffusion theory such as dispositional innovativeness and time of adoption (TOA). We find a strong relationship and explain how users with high LES can offer a contribution to both predicting and accelerating early product adoption.