Studying innovation from a consumer perspective is one of the most exciting endeavors in marketing. The successful development, launch, and adoption of "the new" (be that new products, trends, systems, practices, or beliefs, etc.) is critical to firms, it is true, but also to the fabric of society. Processes of innovation intricately weave together the common warp of individual processes of change (e.g., cognitive elements of awareness, memory, and learning) with the ever-flowing weft of social phenomena (e.g., social networks, cultural meaning, contagion, word of mouth, and impression management) and technological progress (e.g., customization, virtual reality, and the Internet of Things). What could be more intriguing or more important?
Not surprisingly, then, consumer-centric innovation is well represented in the pages of Journal of Consumer Research – in fact, five different major themes have emerged over the last four decades. The curation here is a way to understand five recent focal papers within the context of this history and the diverse structure of knowledge that has been knit together. In the descriptions of these five thematic threads, other relevant work for those interested in reading more deeply within each theme are discussed.
This volume includes the following articles among others:
- Arun Lakshmanan, Charles D. Lindsey and H. Shanker Krishnan: Practice makes perfect? When does massed learning improve product usage proficiency?
- Katie Baca-Motes, Amber Brown, Ayelet Gneezy, Elizabeth A. Keenan and Leif D. Nelson: Commitment and Bbhavior change: Evidence from the field.
- Pierre-Yann Dolbec and Eileen Fischer: Refashioning a Field? Connected consumers and institutional dynamics in markets.
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