Exploring the adoption process of personal technologies: A cognitive-affective approach

Abstract

The impact of cognitive and emotional factors on the customer's decision to adopt a new technology has long been at the core of innovation and marketing literature. Today, the proliferation of personal technologies makes the understanding of the adoption process of such innovations a vital issue. This article, moving from long-established technology adoption theories, integrates affective factors to propose a comprehensive framework to interpret and orient innovation and marketing approaches of Companies. To do this, we review a rich literature from the domains of management, information systems, marketing and cognitive psychology, identifying six possible sources of perceived value for personal technologies, hence attitude to adopt them: functional value, monetary value, social value, entertainment value, epistemic value and aesthetic value. After defining and framing them in the extant literature, we discuss how the framework may be adopted in practice to support Companies' strategies in the surprisingly under-explored industry of personal technologies.

Consumers Emotional Responses to Functional and Hedonic Products: A Neuroscience Research

“…As a large body of research documents, consumers’ evaluations of new products are not purely utilitarian but dependent on the emotions and involvement elicited by the offer ( Bagozzi et al, 1999 ; Kempf, 1999 ; Allen et al, 2005 ; Hassenzahl, 2018 ). Emotional responses constitute predictable and impactful drivers of decision making with regularities in the mechanisms through which they influence product evaluation ( Lerner et al, 2015 ; Bettiga and Lamberti, 2017 ). Research on product adoption and consumption mainly argues that such emotional responses are processed differently by individuals according to the mainly hedonic or utilitarian/functional nature of the product they are evaluating ( Hoch and Ha, 1986 ; Batra and Ahtola, 1991 ; Kempf and Smith, 1998 ; Ren and Nickerson, 2019 ; Yang et al, 2020 ).…”

Does one design fit them all? Study of drivers of co-creation interest along different consumer segments

“…We can thus assume that learning benefits and personal ones are highly associated with this consumer category. The hedonic side of technology usage is also important (Bettiga & Lamberti, 2017). Being optimist in technology triggers the belief of having an increased control, efficiency and flexibility in daily lives (Parasuraman, 2000) and…”

Consumer Adoption of Digital Technologies for Lifestyle Monitoring

“…Hence, both practitioners and academics show a growing interest in understanding the influential factors that explain a continued adoption of these technologies for lifestyle monitoring [3]. Technology adoption processes, indeed, represent a fundamental piece of knowledge to favour the diffusion of innovation [4] especially where such a diffusion may support the adoption of virtuous practices by users [5], as in the case of wearables. In contexts in which public healthcare systems are exposed to budgetary constraints, disease prevention, also through the support to functional, healthy conducts and lifestyles becomes of the essence to ensure welfare sustainability [6].…”