Understanding Innovation-Values Fit from the Consumer Perspective: A New Mixed-Model Approach

innovations that are perceived to be the means to realizing important personal values have a greater likelihood of success than those that clash with or impede value fulfillment. The concept of innovation values fit (or value compatibility)explains broad patterns of consumer adoption across diverse product categories. However, the simple "poor-neutral-good" scales typically used to measure innovation-values fit are incapable of providing the kinds of fine-grained insights considered necessary to support decisions for marketing a particular new product. This research contributes an analytic framework based on the Means-End approach to understand innovation-values fit from the consumer perspective with the goal of informing new product commercialization strategy. The article revisits old practices and initiates new work that probes more deeply, directly, and specifically into how consumers evaluate new products and perceive links between distinctive product features and personal values. Using data from160 personal "laddering" interviews in a national field study, we examine consumer reaction to a next-generation cell phone and discover seven innovation-values themes that drive consumer preference and price expectations in the product category. Implications are discussed for marketers who commercialize innovations and need to understand the incremental benefits that consumers associate with adopting a new product over its rivals.