Consumer learning roadmap: a necessary tool for new products
Seppo J. Hänninen, Birgitta Sandberg · International Journal of Knowledge and Learning · 2006
In order to cope with increasing competition, high-tech firms need to continuously launch new products. However, adoption of new products may require substantive cognitive efforts from consumers. Therefore, firms should be able to monitor and influence their consumer's knowledge base. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the usability of a consumer learning roadmap for high-tech marketing. A tentative framework is built based on the previous literature on innovation adoption and consumers' knowledge development. The usability of this framework is then evaluated on the basis of case studies. The study indicates that in case innovations, firms were actively triggering, monitoring and guiding consumer's knowledge base in order to promote the adoption of successive product generations. This supports the idea that a consumer learning roadmap is a relevant and indeed a successful concept for high-tech marketing. The fact that a consumer learning roadmap has so far been used only marginally means that the most prominent high-technology marketers are likely, little by little, to dominate their market.