CUFE-BS Academic Seminar: Nonmonotonic Status Effects in New ProductAdoption
Time: 24 October 2019, 14:00-16:00 PM
Location: Room 615, CUFE Business School
Speaker: Professor Yansong Hu
Dr. Yansong Hu is an associate professor of marketing at WarwickBusiness School, University of Warwick, UK. His research interests focus on thedevelopment of new products, new technologies and services, their adoption anddiffusion, social network, digital and social media. His research has publishedin leading journals in marketing and management, including Marketing Science,Journal of Product Innovation Management, and featured on INFORMS News andKnowledge@Wharton. His past research has won various international awards,including the American Marketing Association Outstanding Paper Award and theAmerican Academy of Marketing Best Paper Award. He is a member of the editorialboard of the Journal of Business Research, a research affiliate at the ChinaManagement Research Center of Cambridge University, and a regular reviewer forjournals in marketing and innovation research, including the Journal of theAcademy of Marketing Science, Journal of Product Innovation Management, R and Dmanagement, and Industrial Marketing Management.
With multiple teaching awards from the Warwick Business School,he has taught undergraduate, postgraduate and corporate executives from overthirties countries and regions. He has served as a member of the DoctoralCommittee of Warwick Business School and a member of the judge panel for theAmerican Marketing Association Doctoral Thesis Competition.
Abstract: We investigate how the tendency to adopt a new productindependently of social influence, the recipients’ susceptibility to suchinfluence, and the sources’ strength of influence vary with social status.Leveraging insights from social psychology and sociology about middle-statusanxiety and conformity, we propose that for products that potential adoptersexpect to boost their status, both the tendency to adopt independently fromothers and the susceptibility to contagions higher for middle-status than for low-and high-status customers.
Applying a nested case-control design to the adoption ofcommercial kits used in genetic engineering, we find evidence that statusaffects (i) how early or late one adopts regardless of social influence, (ii)how susceptible one is to such influence operating through social ties, and(iii) how influential one’s own behavior is intriguer adoption by others. Theinverse-U patterns in (i) and (ii) are consistent with middle-status anxietyand conformity. The findings have implications for how to use status to betterunderstand adoption and contagion mechanisms, and for targeting customers when launchingnew products.
