The Impact of Communication Strategy on Launching New Products: The Moderating Role of Product Innovativeness

Abstract

Academic literature is filled with debate on whether product innovativeness positively impacts new product performance (NPP) because of increasing competitive advantage or negatively impacts performance due to consumers' fears of novel technology and resultant resistance to adopt. This study investigates this issue by modeling product innovativeness as a moderator that influences the relationship between communication strategy and new product performance. The authors emphasize that the impact of innovativeness to producers is different from that to consumers and that the differences have strategic impact when commercializing highly innovative products. Product innovativeness is conceptualized as multidimensional, and each dimension is tested separately. Four dimensions of innovativeness are explored-product newness to the firm, market newness to the firm, product superiority to the customer, and adoption difficulty for the customer.In this study, communication strategy is comprised of preannouncement strategy and advertising strategy. First, the relationship between whether or not a preannouncement is offered and NPP is explored. Then three types of preannouncement messages (customer education, anticipation creation, and market preemption) are investigated. Advertising strategy is characterized by whether the advertisement campaign at the time of launch was based primarily on emotional or functional appeals.Using empirical results from 284 surveys of product managers, the authors find that the relationship between communication strategy and NPP is moderated by innovativeness, and that the relationships differ not only by degree but also by type of innovativeness. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

Forecasting consumer perception of innovativeness

“…Perceived complexity is negatively related to adoption such that an innovation perceived to be more complex will be less likely to be adopted (Rogers, 2003). Perceived complexity should not have an independent effect upon CPI, because a product's complexity does not necessarily indicate how innovative the product is, contrary to the implicit assumptions of prior research (Lee and O'Connor, 2003). A holographic projector, for example, may be perceived as very complex to use, yet consumers may still rate it as innovative because it is perceived to be a new concept with a relative advantage.…”

“…Other new product development researchers have defined product innovativeness as new product creativity (Moorman, 1995;Moorman and Miner, 1997), novelty (Andrews and Smith, 1996;Sethi, Smith, and Park, 2001), a combination of product superiority to the customer and adoption difficulty to the customer (Lee and O'Connor, 2003), or a combination of the extent to which the new product "…offers new benefits, incorporates new features, is superior to other products, and requires change in consumer attitude, behavior, and learning effort…" (Talke and O'Connor, 2011). Some new product development researchers view product innovativeness as a separate, singular construct consisting of three dimensions (technological discontinuity, market discontinuity, and customer discontinuity) that is distinct from related constructs such as product advantage (McNally, Cavusgil, and Calantone, 2010).…”

“…Including perspectives from studies which use managers as raters of consumers' perceptions, the literature still seems unclear on this issue. In general, innovativeness from the consumer's perspective (though measured with managers) has been viewed along two broad dimensions, defined by some as novelty and meaningfulness (Sethi et al, 2001), and defined by others as superiority to the customer and adoption difficulty (Lee and O'Connor, 2003).…”

“…This absence is important, because some research has viewed product innovativeness (from the customer's perspective) as a formative construct consisting of relative advantage and complexity (Lee and O'Connor, 2003). It could be that complexity itself does not have an independent effect on consumer perceptions of innovativeness, but instead moderates the effect of CPI on other constructs such as attitude toward the innovation.…”

“…Furthermore, Figure 3 Firstly, the findings from this research suggest that CPI is a unidimensional abstract concept, not a multidimensional concept as much past research implies. Prior research has been fragmented and seems to have viewed CPI as unidimensional, defined by constructs such as new product creativity (Moorman, 1995;Moorman and Minor, 1997) and perceived newness (Hoeffler, 2003), or as a multidimensional formative construct consisting of dimensions such as newness and impact (Olshavsky and Spreng, 1996), product superiority over existing alternatives and adoption difficulty (Lee and O'Connor, 2003), or difference from other products, change in behavior and perceived newness (Moreau, Lehman and Markman, 2001). Given that none of these studies psychometrically developed the scales and assessed their dimensionality, the research presented here contributes to this debate by showing that CPI is best viewed as unidimensional.…”