Although firms are faced by a large number of market introduction failures, research into a major driver of these failures, customer resistance to innovation, is surprisingly scarce. While most authors have investigated positive adoption decisions, this paper focuses instead on consumer resistance to innovation. The current study presents a conceptual framework which explicates the major components of consumer resistance: (1) rejection, (2) postponement, and (3) opposition, and discusses two main groups of antecedents to consumer resistance: (1) degree of change required and (2) conflicts with the consumer’s prior belief structure. This framework is explored with both a literature review and a qualitative focus group study. These joint efforts result in the formulation of a model of consumer resistance. Finally, the authors discuss several relevant theoretical and strategic implications, and point out directions for future research.
Despite company efforts to adopt consumer-oriented innovation development processes focused on delivering added value to the consumer (Danneels, 2003), most commercial companies are faced with high rates of innovation failures (Moore, 2002). This is puzzling, as innovation adoption research has stressed that relative advantage is a dominant driver of consumer adoption. Nevertheless, many innovations still meet resistance (Garcia and Atkin, 2002 and Molesworth and Suortti, 2002). The reasons for this resistance vary and have not as yet received a significant amount of study, but examples illustrate the diversity of innovations which meet resistance. For example, consumers expressed moral objections against genetically modified food, and actively campaigned against the introduction of these innovations (Bredahl, 2001 and Fortin and Renton, 2003). Consumer resistance also appears in the case of simpler innovations. For example, many wine drinkers steadfastly refused to accept the screw cap as an acceptable replacement for the traditional cork on wine bottles (Garcia & Atkin, 2002).
While numerous studies explore factors that contribute to the “positive” decision to adopt such innovations (e.g., Lennon et al., 2007 and Lin et al., 2007), understanding why customers resist adoption is at least as important (Midgley and Dowling, 1993 and Szmigin and Foxall, 1998). While fundamental innovation research (Rogers, 2003) has always at least tacitly recognized this importance, empirical research in this field has been less active in investigating the nature and drivers of resistance compared to adoption. In particular, it is rarely the case that studies explicitly differentiate adoption from resistance; instead implicitly considering resistance as simply non-adoption (Nabih, Bloem, & Poiesz, 1997). However, it is not appropriate to conclude that consumer resistance is simply the obverse of adoption (Gatignon and Robertson, 1989, Herbig and Day, 1992 and Ram and Sheth, 1989).
The objective of this paper is to develop insight into this relatively underdeveloped area in the innovation literature. The nature of the contribution provided is thus twofold. First, a detailed theoretical conceptualization of consumer resistance is developed. Ram and Sheth (1989) have provided an initial investigation of this concept, where they recognize that consumer resistance reveals itself in different forms of behavior, being rejection, postponement, and opposition, which appear similar to the ideas put forward by Coetsee (1999). Nevertheless, as suggested by Nabih et al. (1997), these concepts tend to lack standardized conceptual and operational definitions, and resistance itself appears to have been confused with the simple, and more passive, notion of ‘non-adoption’ (Peñaloza & Price, 1993). Following from this, with few noteworthy exceptions (e.g., Ram & Sheth, 1989), little research has been done on the antecedents which may create consumer resistance to innovations (Lapointe & Rivard, 2005). This article reports the results of a combined theory-driven and theory-generating study conducted according to the aforementioned objectives. First, an integrative overview of relevant literature is presented. Additionally, the methods and results of a qualitative focus-group study are discussed. Finally, limitations and directions for future research are detailed.
