From Fear to Loathing? How Emotion Influences the Evaluation and Early Use of Innovations

Abstract

Innovation adoption is rarely a short process for consumers; accordingly, recent research has explored adoption as a dynamic process that is characterized by changing patterns, or diffusion, of consumer use of the innovation. This research suggests that adoption is rarely a neutral process and that consumers can experience strong emotions in the initial use of innovations. However, given such emotions, two opposing arguments can be made as to whether the inclusion of emotional responses increases the predictive power of traditional models of diffusion. On the one hand, experienced emotion may simply be a function of gained benefits and, as such, may already be captured in extant models through cognitive assessments of net benefits. On the other hand, and as data from two empirical and longitudinal studies demonstrate, the learning process is potentially emotion generating (independent of net benefits), and this emotion colors product evaluations. The emotional influence is sizable and, importantly, not a straightforward case of “easier is better.” In this work, the authors present the E³ (expectation → emotion → evaluation) model, which describes how managers can better predict and influence the successful diffusion of complex technological products.