Innovation Uptakes: Understanding Consumer Contexts from the Perspective of Consumption

This paper considers a mechanism in which consumers make decisions to take up innovations and suggests that consumer innovation uptakes should be looked at from the consumption point of view. There is a gap in our knowledge of the way consumer cultures of consumption and lifestyles explain their decisions to adopt innovations, as existing research mainly looks at the technical functionalities and the effects of demographic and personality factors. People make small, conscious decisions everyday, and the multiplicity of these decisions contributes to their routines that consist of a number of inter-connected cultural elements and make up lifestyles. Lifestyles are therefore the way people use their resources; they are patterns of action that differentiate people and are sets of practices which make sense in a particular context. Thus, cultures of consumption help explain what people do, why they do it and what doing it means to them. So, a close examination of underlying values, such as meanings of consumption, its contexts and everyday practices, offers us a deeper understanding of the dynamics of consumption activities, and indeed of innovation adoption behaviour. This way, we can identify differences in people’s values, attitudes towards an innovation and their innovation adoption behaviour, and provide a conceptualisation of innovation adoption and diffusion processes on the basis of differences in individual consumer values and behaviours.