The Effects of Country and Gender Differences on Consumer Innovativeness and Decision Processes in a Highly Globalized High-Tech Product Market

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to focus on two objectives. First, to investigate how two consumer innovativeness measures (domain-specific innovativeness (DSI) and general innovativeness (GI)) in a highly globalized product market (i.e. laptop computer) are related to two widely used demographics, country and gender. Second, to examine how innovativeness affects a series of consumer decisions such as information search, opinion dependency, and store choice. Design/methodology/approach – The authors build a conceptual model linking two important demographics (i.e. country and gender) and consumer innovativeness (both DSI and GI), and test it using binomial logistic regression, with a sample of 614 respondents from Korea, China, and the USA. Findings – Results are generally consistent with the authors' hypotheses. The two consumer innovativeness measures are significantly influenced by the two demographic factors, and product-specific innovativeness shows more plausible results than GI. Furthermore, consumers' decision processes were found to have idiosyncratic patterns regarding consumer innovativeness and the two demographic moderators. Research limitations/implications – The study may have demographical bias for two reasons: use of only limited metropolitan samples and a somewhat unbalanced sample in gender and occupation. Practical implications – In the early stage of new product launch, DSI will be dominantly useful in market segmentation and targeting rather than GI. However, management should not overlook variability of countries and genders since consumers show idiosyncratic patterns in their decision processes. Originality/value – The paper explores the field of consumer innovativeness studies using comparison of the two dimensions of consumer innovativeness measurements. Also, the study reconfirms the importance of demographics on consumers' decisions in the early stage of highly globalized product markets.