Susceptibility to Social influence in New Product Adoption: An Exploration of Its Antecedents and Consequences

Abstract

Social influence has been recognised as one of the significant drivers of individuals’ behaviour in sociology, social psychology, economics and consumer research. In recent years, marketing managers and researchers have been interested in leveraging social influence to accelerate the adoption of new products in social networks. Considerable effort has been devoted to studying the influence of opinion leaders who have disproportionate influence on others, while less is known about the role of individual susceptibility in contributing to social influence dynamics. Moreover, the joint distributions of influence and susceptibility in social networks may determine the pattern of social influence in the adoption process. Therefore, the present study focuses on a recent line of research on susceptibility to social influence within social networks in new product adoption. In addition, whether an individual is susceptible to social influence may largely depend on what kinds of influence they experience. This research seeks a better understanding of social influence in new product adoption and distinguishes three social influence mechanisms – informational social influence, normative social influence, and status competition – in a social network context.

Drawing on Diffusion of Innovation Theory and Social Network Theory, this research applies a theoretical framework in which consumer attributes, product characteristics and social network characteristics are integrated to investigate the antecedents, consequences and moderators of consumer susceptibility to social influence in new product adoption. This study collected data by distributing sociometric survey questionnaires to undergraduates at a large university in China. Six consumer electronics were selected as the sample new products through a pretest. Data analysis based on a sample of 457 respondents indicates that the consumer attribute (i.e., opinion leadership) and the product characteristic (i.e., perceived risk) significantly affect susceptibility to three types of social influence (i.e., informational influence, normative influence, and status competition), which in turn influence consumers’ new product adoption behaviour. This study also provides evidence of gender differences and the moderating roles of three network characteristics (tie strength, density, and degree centrality) in susceptibility to social influence in new product adoption.

This research makes several contributions to social influence research on new product adoption. First, the findings shed light on the nature of the social influence mechanisms at work in the adoption process by distinguishing different influence mechanisms and involving multiple moderators. Second, the present study combines diffusion research with social network analysis to explicate the effects of not only individual attributes but also the structure of connections among individuals on new product adoption.

The findings also have implications for marketing practice. First, the findings have implications for a better understanding of how social influence operates over social networks in new product adoption. Second, this study provides marketers with insights into leveraging social influence through identifying not only influentials but also influenceables. This will assist marketing managers to leverage social influence in new product adoption and eventually increase the effectiveness of network marketing.