The Impact of Communication Strategy on Launching New Products: The Moderating Role of Product Innovativeness

Academic literature is filled with debate on whether product innovativeness positively impacts new product performance (NPP) because of increasing competitive advantage or negatively impacts performance due to consumers' fears of novel technology and resultant resistance to adopt. This study investigates this issue by modeling product innovativeness as a moderator that influences the relationship between communication strategy and new product performance. The authors emphasize that the impact of innovativeness to producers is different from that to consumers and that the differences have strategic impact when commercializing highly innovative products. Product innovativeness is conceptualized as multidimensional, and each dimension is tested separately. Four dimensions of innovativeness are explored—product newness to the firm, market newness to the firm, product superiority to the customer, and adoption difficulty for the customer. In this study, communication strategy is comprised of preannouncement strategy and advertising strategy. First, the relationship between whether or not a preannouncement is offered and NPP is explored. Then three types of preannouncement messages (customer education, anticipation creation, and market preemption) are investigated. Advertising strategy is characterized by whether the advertisement campaign at the time of launch was based primarily on emotional or functional appeals. Using empirical results from 284 surveys of product managers, the authors find that the relationship between communication strategy and NPP is moderated by innovativeness, and that the relationships differ not only by degree but also by type of innovativeness. Implications for research and practice are discussed.