Perceptual Patterns, Information Handling, and Innovativeness

Few studies have explored differences in adoption behavior and information handling caused by consumers' varied perceptions of innovativeness of new products. The literature is based largely on research by other disciplines into the adoption of innovations quite different from their predecessors. Diffusion research in marketing has also tended to focus on comparatively innovative and socially conspicuous items. But the vast majority of new consumer products are highly continuous innovations [16, 18], whose improvements are at most evolutionary. Furthermore, typical mass media promotion of a new product differs from the sources and profusion of information about discontinuous-type innovations so often studied.