C ONSUMER I NNOVATIVENESS AND I NNOVATION P REFERENCE

Besides investigating the modulating effect of brands on conscious and unconscious innovation preference, another main objective of this thesis was to study whether different groups of innova-tion adopters would have significantly different preferences towards innovainnova-tions with either estab-lished or novel brands. In the innovation literature and particularly emphasized within the diffusion paradigm, consumers respond differently to innovative products, depending on which specific adopter category they belong to. The adopter category to which a consumer belongs is determined by their personal characteristics, which in the context of innovation is measured through the meas-urement of consumer innovativeness. In terms of a preferred branding strategy for an innovation, it is important to consider which brand strategy to use with different segments of consumers. In our study, we isolated two polar opposites, namely early adopters and late movers.

Moreover, as fixation duration was revealed to be a weak and unreliable measurement of the want-ing response in our research design, i.e. the unconscious incentive salience, we solely examined the participants from consciously reported measurements of subjective liking of manipulated stimuli in hypothesis 3.

In recent studies, researchers have found that consumers identified as early adopters may have heightened preference for novel brands over established brands, as they have another sensitivity to risk and novelty than other adopter categories (Roger, 2003; Klink & Athaide, 2010; Rubera &

Droge, 2013; Patel & Haon, 2014). In particular, our thesis was inspired by the paper of Klink &

Athaide (2010), who found support for the abovementioned notion and similarly applied the same domain-specific measurement of consumer innovativeness, albeit in a different product category.

Initially, we aspired to replicate the findings of previous research papers and thus H3A was conduct-ed to examine whether the early adopters would show a significantly stronger subjective liking for innovations with novel brands compared to innovations with established brands. Remarkably, there

was an unexpected significant difference of means between the novel brand and established brand conditions. We found that the opposite was true, namely that early adopters displayed a significant-ly stronger subjective liking for innovations with established brands compared to novel brands. As a result, H3A was rejected.

This finding that early adopters prefer innovations with established brands is particular interesting in the light of the recent brand extension research pointing towards the opposite finding that early adopters prefer innovations with novel brands. Thus, our finding challenges this perception of the current literature on brand extensions and branding strategy. On the other hand, our findings sup-port the literature, which suggest that brand extensions with established brands are the most pre-ferred by consumers in general.

Furthermore, the study intended to examine whether the early adopters and late movers differed significantly in their subjective likings of innovations with either established or novel brands. Here, we expected that early adopters would show a significantly stronger preference for the products in both conditions, which was studied in H3B and H3C. In H3B we predicted that early adopters would show a stronger subjective liking for innovations with novel brands compared to late movers, whilst in H3C we anticipated that early adopters likewise would show a stronger subjective liking for inno-vations with established brands. Here, both hypotheses were rejected and there was no significant difference in the two conditions. Hence, it apparently does not seem that the two groups of adopters show different preferences for innovations with novel and established brands respectively.

However, it is considered important to discuss essential differences between our study and that of the literature supporting early adopters as in favour of novel brands, particularly the paper and find-ings of Klink & Athaide (2010), which we tried to replicate. First, whilst the paper of Klink &

Athaide (2010) likewise recruited undergraduate students of both genders and approximately the same average age (20), we only recruited males with an average age of 21. Research has shown there is a difference in preferences for technology between the two genders (He & Freeman, 2010) and as such we aspired to minimize this effect and isolate the modulating effects of brands. Second, in the research of Klink & Athaide (2010), the product stimuli applied are low-involvement, fast-moving consumer goods (FMCGs), however, our thesis focuses on high-involvement technology and electronics. Remarkably, Klink & Athaide (2010) implicitly generalize their findings as

univer-sally applicable to other brand extension situations. Whilst Klink & Athaide (2010) find support for early adopters being in favour of novel brands in a FMCG setting, we do not find support for the notion in a technology and electronics setting. Thus, the universal applicability of their findings is questioned.

Albeit differences, we likewise sought to assure that effects from perceptions of fit between brand and product were minimized to explicitly isolate the modulating effect of brand knowledge. Addi-tionally, it is significant to consider potential shortcomings of our own research design, which may have affected our results and findings. Similar to Klink & Athaide (2010), a domain-specific meas-urement of consumer innovativeness as developed by Klink & Smith (2001) was applied. However, despite the popularity of the consumer innovativeness construct, it has been profoundly criticised for not always being a consistent and reliable predictor of innovation adoption behaviour and pref-erence (Roehrich, 2004; Hirunyawipada & Paswan, 2006). In the consumer innovativeness litera-ture, there is no terminological consensus on the definition and likewise no consensus on the drivers of consumer innovativeness (Roerich, 2004).

As a consequence of consumer innovativeness being an unreliable research variable, it may be dif-ficult to correctly categorize the different adopter categories and it likewise undermines the quality and reliability of our findings. Nonetheless, Klink & Athaide (2010) apply the same measurement of consumer innovativeness and thus a situation arise in which it is complicated to determine the reliability and validity of both findings respectively. Despite being a rather criticised measurement, we have applied consumer innovativeness as a measurement since it is the currently preferred aca-demic variable to categorize the various adopter categories. Other measurements, such as the re-sistance to change scale, have been highlighted in the literature, but remains to be empirically vali-dated in classifying the different adopter categories. We found this task beyond the scope of this paper, thus the measurement of consumer innovativeness was applied.

Lastly, it is important to note that because of a small sample size and implications to our research design, we do not provide conclusive evidence for the notion of early adopters preferring innova-tions with established brands to innovainnova-tions with novel brands. Thus, we do not entirely exclude the findings supporting early adopters as being in favour of novel brands.