Consumer receptivity to innovations: individual, peer-group and country-level effects

An innovation is only as good as a consumer’s confidence in it. More often than not, an individual’s demand for and confidence in an innovation has been measured using the dispositional approach wherein it is the degree of an individual’s eagerness to engage with new product or service or his perception of benefit that the product or service has to offer are what become the sole drivers of an individual’s confidence in an innovation. In this paper, we draw upon sociological theories of social norms and look at the regulatory influence of an individual’s peer-group’s perception of an innovation on the individual’s confidence in that innovation. Thus, the paper intends to contribute towards explanations of individual-level innovation confidence by highlighting the socially contextualized aspects of adoption and diffusion of innovation.