What is Prevention-Focus

Consumer innovativeness is one of the most explored concepts in new product adoption literature. Nevertheless, the intention to adopt novelties, specifically in a product category domain, still needs exploration of what happened during the choice process. Consumers can build their decision about whether to adopt innovation based on their hierarchy of choice goals. The authors propose this hierarchy is driven by the regulatory focus system, based on promotion (justifiability and choice confidence) and prevention goals (anticipated regret and evaluation costs). In order to demonstrate this reasoning, the authors compared “most innovative” versus “less innovative” consumers, regarding their prevention and promotion goals. The most innovative ones demonstrated higher justifiability and choice confidence and showed more capabability of avoiding an anticipated choice regret when compared with the less innovative consumers. The differences explored in the analysis highlight the necessity of further understanding how consumers perform during the choice process of innovative products.