How a Mismatched Ad Drives Early Adoption of Co-Created Innovations

Abstract

Innovation co-creation has contributed to some of the most creative inventions and significantly transformed innovation strategies. However, persuading the market into the early adoption of co-created innovations challenges many cocreating businesses and dampens customer-inventors’ enthusiasm to participate—the very core that fuel the success and sustainability of the co-creation model. In innovation research, beyond our understanding of macro-level determinants for aggregated takeoff or a “user-designed” labeling strategy that promotes adoption of co-created innovations over firm-designed innovations, it is unclear what unique micro-level marketing communication strategies may drive early adoption of co-created innovations at both individual and aggregated levels. This research examines how ads of co-created innovations may strategically incorporate mixed non-narrative and narrative messages to influence early adoption. In particular, we suggest that presenting a mismatched (vs. matched) motivational orientations between the advocacy of the innovation benefits (non-narratives) and stories of customer invention (narratives) increases adoption of newly introduced cocreated innovations. This happens because a motivational mismatch in mixed advocacy-narrative messages is more likely to activate adopters’ narrative selfreferencing of their own motivations for the innovation. This mismatch effect is stronger for follower-adopters than innovator-adopters at the innovation introduction stage, and hence triggers aggregated takeoff. We conducted three studies using mixed methods to validate the hypotheses. In experimental study 1 and study 2, we demonstrated the mismatched effect on adoption of newly introduced co-created innovation, its underlying mechanism and the boundary condition by adopter types. In study 3, we analyzed actual adoption (sales) data of nearly one hundred real-world co-created innovations and found that mismatched (vs. matched) ads leads to early takeoff.