Consumer's adoption of the technology innovations : the role of coping strategies

  • Wenjing BAO

Student thesis: MPhil Thesis (Lingnan)

Abstract

Given the accelerated technology innovations and shorter product lifecycles, explaining and predicting consumers’ adoption of technology innovations have been increasingly difficult. With new generations of the same products emerging every few years or less, consumers often face the dilemma of choosing between continuing to use the existing product and upgrading to a new version, and have increasingly experienced a certain level of technology fatigue. They may delay the adoption, frog-leap the new product, and simply ignore its existence. Thus, the traditional models of adoption based on product attributes and consumer innovativeness can no longer accommodate these new realities. Based on the concepts of uncertainty and paradoxes associated with new technologies, this study proposes a modified technology adoption model (TAM) by incorporating the concept of coping strategies, which include ignoring, rejecting, delaying, extended decision making, and pretesting.

First, this study defines the concept of coping strategies and their measurements and specifies a revised TAM. Based on a survey of 219 consumers regarding the adoption of 3G mobile services in Hong Kong, the construct validity and external validity of coping is tested using confirmatory factor analysis and multiple regression. Using structural equation modeling, the study finds that consumer’ coping strategy is a significant predictor of their perceptions of product, which in turn affect consumer’s adoption decision. Moreover, the profiles of consumers enacting different coping strategies are delineated. The proposed model in this research provides more coherent explanations of consumers’ adoption decision process, can help build more accurate forecasting models, and furnish meaningful implications of marketing technology products to today’s tech-savvy and tech-weary consumers.
Date of Award2006
Original languageEnglish
Awarding Institution
  • Department of Marketing and International Business
SupervisorGeng CUI (Supervisor) & Tsang Sing CHAN (Supervisor)

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