Human Behavior
Innovation consumers and users
| Selected Publications |
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| Xiao, Y., & Spanjol, J. (2021). Yes, but not now! Why some users procrastinate in adopting digital product updates. Journal of Business Research, 135, 685-696. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2021.06.066 Abstract: Users of digital products (such as mobile apps or software) are frequently offered new versions in the form of updates. While updates can deliver benefits, they may also interfere with the ongoing use of digital products. We investigate why digital product users might delay implementing adoption intentions (which we term adoption procrastination) of updates. Three experimental studies show that while users may intend to adopt new versions, they deliberately delay adopting them under certain conditions. Specifically, we identify how perceived changes in the new version can trigger annoyance, leading to adoption procrastination. We further identify anticipated inaction regret as a counteracting mechanism, which reduces adoption procrastination. Our research makes theoretical and empirical contributions to consumer innovation adoption literature. First, we introduce the novel concept of adoption procrastination, expanding previously examined adoption-related decisions. Second, we propose and empirically test cognitive and affective mechanisms determining digital product users’ adoption procrastination. |
Azzari, C. N., Anderson, L., Mende, M., Jefferies, J. G., Downey, H., Ostrom, A. L., & Spanjol, J. (2021). Consumers on the job: contextualization crafting in expert services. Journal of Service Research, 24(4), 520-541. https://doi.org/10.1177/10946705211012474 Abstract: Tasked with a greater role in the coproduction of expert services, consumers often face an immense burden in coproducing service and well-being outcomes. While some prior research has explored customer work, we delineate unique aspects of expert services and articulate consumer efforts that transpire outside the dyadic service interaction. Through netnographic inquiry in a health care context, we find that coproduction efforts are job-like and require job crafting efforts. Upon this foundation, three major themes emerged: (1) consumers leverage their context expertise by adapting content expertise to their unique circumstances, (2) consumers develop and deploy strategies (hacks) through affordances in order to manage their coproduction jobs, and (3) consumers move through the expert service journey in a variety of ways that shift them toward or away from well-being outcomes. After assessing the transferability of our results by analyzing a second expert service context (financial services/debt management), we suggest implications for theory, practice, and future research. |
Spanjol, J., Xiao, Y., & Welzenbach, L. (2018). Successive innovation in digital and physical products: synthesis, conceptual framework, and research directions. Innovation and Strategy, 15, 31-62. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1548-643520180000015004 Abstract: Purpose Companies are increasingly leveraging digital technologies toward innovation strategies that deliver novel features to customers sequentially through successive new product generations (i.e., successive innovation). Extant literature examining successive innovation is both limited and fragmented across marketing and management literatures. Our goal is to synthesize literature on concepts related to successive innovation (such as versioning and upgrades) to identify the core dimensions of successive innovation and provide a cohesive framework to guide future research in this domain. Methodology/approach Given the equivocality in understanding the conceptual domain of successive innovation, we review and synthesize literature across three disciplinary domains: marketing, management, and information and decision sciences. Based on the emerging patterns from the literature review, we develop a conceptual framework of successive innovation with the aim of moving the discussion toward greater theoretical clarity. Findings Based on the literature review and synthesis, we identify three core-dimensions that define successive innovation and compare these across digital and physical product realms: coexistence, embeddedness, and adoption controllability. Research Implications Our proposed conceptual dimensions of successive innovation, and discussion of differences across physical and digital product domains, offer important directions for future research and a common vocabulary. As physical and digital successive innovations can differ in coexistence, embeddedness, and adoption controllability, firms need to consider relevant barriers to adoption of successive product generations and select appropriate strategies to promote and communicate successive innovation. Our proposed successive innovation conceptual dimensions help managers comprehend the complexity of arranging such innovation in business and consumer segments. Originality/value Our contribution to the emerging literature on successive innovation is threefold. First, by conducting a comprehensive literature review, we integrate insights from different fields of inquiry (i.e., marketing, management, and information and decision sciences). Second, based on the synthesis of the literature, we offer a conceptual framework of successive innovation, which aims to move the discussion toward greater theoretical clarity. Third, based on our review and conceptual framework, we discuss a set of future research directions to guide academic research efforts. |
| Hietschold, N., Gurtner, S., & Spanjol, J. (2017). Understanding and responding to negative emotions in consumer resistance to innovations. In Academy of Management Proceedings (Vol. 2017, No. 1, p. 16405). https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/231202248.pdf Abstract: Despite increasing research and managerial best practices in innovation management, firms still face new product failure rates of approximately 40%(Castellion & Markham, 2013). Since the success of an innovation ultimately depends on the consumers accepting it (Hauser, Tellis, & Griffin, 2006), understanding and managing consumer resistance is detrimental to firms. The case of genetically modified food (GMF) shows that consumers often differ in their perceptions of benefits and risks and therefore experience a plethora of … |
| Anderson, L., Spanjol, J., Jefferies, J. G., Ostrom, A. L., Nations Baker, C., Bone, S. A., ... & Rapp, J. M. (2016). Responsibility and well-being: resource integration under responsibilization in expert services. Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, 35(2), 262-279. https://doi.org/10.1509/jppm.15.140 Abstract: Responsibilization, or the shift of functions and risks from providers and producers to consumers, has become an increasingly common policy in service systems and marketplaces (e.g., financial, health, governmental). Because responsibilization is often considered synonymous with consumer agency and well-being, the authors take a transformative service research perspective and draw on resource integration literature to investigate whether responsibilization is truly associated with well-being. The authors focus on expert services, for which responsibilization concerns are particularly salient, and question whether this expanding policy is in the public interest. In the process, they develop a conceptualization of resource integration under responsibilization that includes three levels of actors (consumer, provider, and service system), the identification of structural tensions surrounding resource integration, and three categories of resource-integration practices (access, appropriation, and management) necessary to negotiate responsibilization. The findings have important implications for providers, public and institutional policy makers, and service systems, all of which must pay more active attention to the challenges consumers face in negotiating responsibilization and the resulting well-being outcomes. |
| Spanjol, J., & Tam, L. (2015, December). It’s the Thoughts that Count: Substitution for Goal Striving Actions. In Looking Forward, Looking Back: Drawing on the Past to Shape the Future of Marketing: Proceedings of the 2013 World Marketing Congress (pp. 11-11). Cham: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24184-5_5 Abstract: Planning is widely regarded as a critical tool for helping consumers successfully achieve their personal finance goals. Although planning has been identified as an effective self-regulatory tool, our research demonstrates that planning is not universally beneficial. Across two studies, our results demonstrate that planning delays initiation of goal pursuit behaviors for prevention-focused consumers who have adopted avoidance goals, since they perceive the act of planning to represent legitimate goal progress. In other words, making plans regarding when, where, and how to achieve a personal finance goal under prevention fit leads consumers to perceive themselves as having started to make progress towards their goal, although they only expended cognitive goal-directed effort. In turn, this perception leads to a delay in behaviors aimed at debt reduction. This finding carries important implications for marketing practice and theory. |
| Spanjol, J., Qualls, W. J., & Rosa, J. A. (2011). How many and what kind? The role of strategic orientation in new product ideation. Journal of Product Innovation Management, 28(2), 236-250. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-5885.2010.00794.x Abstract: Existing studies on the role that strategic orientation plays in companies' innovation efforts primarily focus on identifying the relationship between strategic orientation and innovation performance for launched new products. In contrast, this article investigates how the different types of strategic orientation (i.e., customer, competitor, and technology orientations) influence the front end of innovation. Specifically, this research examines how strategic orientation relates to new product ideation outcomes such as ideation volume (i.e., how many new product ideas are generated) and ideation novelty (i.e., how innovative ideas are). The model developed in this study includes both direct effects of strategic orientation on new product ideation and indirect effects on ideation, mediated by an organization's market search behavior targeted at uncovering new product ideas. A survey of 182 marketing and technical managers, whose responses are analyzed with partial least squares (PLS), reveals that firms characterized by a competitor orientation search their markets significantly more for new product ideas than firms marked by a technology or customer orientation. An emphasis on market search behavior, in turn, leads to significantly greater quantities of new product ideas generated by the firm. Neither a competitor nor a customer orientation significantly enhances the novelty of new product ideas, which is augmented only by technology orientation. The data also reveal that product ideation novelty is significantly enhanced by a technology orientation regardless of the level of market turbulence faced by the innovating firm. Together, these findings suggest that market orientation may have a greater influence on the implementation and commercialization stages of new product development than on new product ideation. |
| Tam, L., Bagozzi, R. P., & Spanjol, J. (2010). When planning is not enough: the self-regulatory effect of implementation intentions on changing snacking habits. Health Psychology, 29(3), 284. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0019071 Abstract: Objective: This study examined whether matching implementation intentions to people's regulatory orientation affects the effectiveness of changing unhealthy snacking habits. Design: Participants' regulatory orientation was either measured (as a chronic trait) or manipulated (as a situational state), and participants were randomly assigned to implementation intention conditions to eat more healthy snacks or avoid eating unhealthy ones. Main Outcome Measures: A self-reported online food diary of healthy and unhealthy snacks over a 2-day period. Results: Participants with weak unhealthy snacking habits consumed more healthy snacks when forming any type of implementation intentions (regardless of match or mismatch with their regulatory orientation), while participants with strong unhealthy snacking habits consumed more healthy snacks only when forming implementation intentions that matched their regulatory orientations. Conclusion: Results suggest that implementation intentions that match regulatory orientation heighten motivation intensity and put snacking under intentional control for people with strong unhealthy snacking habits. (APA PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved) |