Does Consumer Innovativeness Matter in Electrified Vehicle? The Moderation Role of Consumer Involvement

Abstract

Electrified vehicles have become a solution to greenhouse gas emissions. However, the diffusion of this sustainable transportation is slow, and consumer innovativeness is suggested to have a weak predictive power on electrified vehicle adoption. The aim of this study was to understand how consumer innovativeness and involvement may affect customers’ electrified vehicle purchase behavior. The results indicate that consumer innovativeness has less ability to predict electrified vehicle adoption. This finding offers insights for the formulation of marketing strategies on facilitating electrified vehicle adoption, which should focus on highly involved consumers with a high level of consumer innovativeness. This study highlights the importance of the role of personality traits and supports the proposition that of distinction between consumer innovativeness and involvement. This study focuses on the role of personality traits on consumers’ actual electrified vehicle adoption behavior rather than purchase intention.

Keywords:

• Consumer innovativeness
• consumer involvement
• electrified vehicle
• new product adoption
• moderation

Acknowledgments

One of the coauthors, Dr. Li Sun, was the assistant professor at Zayed University at the time of the study. We would like to thank the support from Zayed University, as well as the anonymous reviewers for their very valuable comments.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by Zayed University, United Arab Emirates in the context of Research Incentive Fund program.