Never Forget Where You're Coming from: The Role of Existing Products in Adoptions of Substituting Technologies

The adoption of technological product innovations has received considerable attention among academics and practitioners alike, although the circumstances in which a new technology seeks to replace an existing product have remained largely overlooked. Research into the adoption of substituting technologies should incorporate this perspective, which provides insights into how technology adoption depends on the existing situation. From this perspective, the authors investigate how consumers' emphasis on an existing product's attributes influences their adoption of a substituting innovation. Data obtained from 217 respondents indicates that consumers' liking of an existing product's attributes can prompt a negative affective reaction to the substituting technology. This negative affective reaction in turn may lead to less positive cognitive evaluations of the substituting technology and affect consumers' adoption intentions. This investigation complements existing research in two important ways: First, the results emphasize the importance of taking existing products into account when studying the adoption of substituting technologies. Second, this study adds to the sparse findings regarding the link between affect and cognition in technology adoption contexts.