Chapter 15

• Innovations can be classified in terms of their novelty, the benefits they offer, and their breadth.
• Consumers adopt an innovation, resist adoption, and marketers must understand the timing of adoption decisions.
• Social System Characteristics include Modernity, Physical distance, Homophily, Opinion leadership, and Cultural self-perspectives.
• Diffusion is a process that relates to the product life cycle.
• The main factors that affect adoption, resistance, and diffusion are the degree of novelty, benefits offered, and breadth.
• Innovations can be characterized by their degree of novelty: continuous, limited effect on existing consumption patterns; dynamically continuous, pronounced effect on consumption practices; or discontinuous, offering that is so new that one has never known anything like it before.
• Benefits offered by innovations can be functional, hedonic or aesthetic, or symbolic.
• Innovations can offer new and different uses for a particular product.
• Cocreation involves consumers in creating value through participation in new product development.
• Adoption is the purchase of an innovation, while resistance is the desire not to buy an innovation.
• Adoption decisions are influenced by the characteristics of adopter groups: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards.
• Diffusion is the percentage of the population that has adopted an innovation at a specific point in time.
• Fad is an innovation that has a very short product life cycle.
• Adaptability is the extent to which the innovation can foster new styles.
• Classic is an innovation that has a lengthy product life cycle.
• Consumer learning requirements include compatibility, trialability, and complexity.
• Legitimacy is the extent to which the innovation follows established guidelines.
• Product life cycle includes introduction, growth, maturity, and decline stages.
• Uncertainty affects adoption, resistance, and diffusion of innovation.
• Fashion is an innovation that has a moderately long and potentially cyclical product life cycle.
• Perceived value and perceived benefits are key innovation characteristics.
• Contagion is the degree to which consumers influence each other in the diffusion of a new product.
• Diffusion curves can be S-shaped, characterized by slow initial growth followed by a rapid increase, or exponential, with rapid initial growth.
• Adoption Decision Process© is a concept developed by Cengage Learning.
• Social relevance is the degree to which an innovation can be observed, or observability, and social value, which is when a product is socially desirable and speeds diffusion.