Switching between consumer technologies

Consumer technologies have become pervasive and ubiquitous in modern societies. These technologies have moved from being luxuries to necessities for average consumers. Moreover, they have become more affordable, are easily accessible, and have significant value-propositions. Many of these technologies, e.g. Web browsers, are available on the Internet as shareware or freeware. Today, it has become an increasingly simple task for the average consumer to find, acquire, set up and use these technologies. Consequently, there is little in the way that prevents a consumer from abandoning these technologies once they are adopted, or switching over to competitive offerings. The focus of this article is to seek an understanding of what factors lead a consumer to abandon one product offering for another. Scholars in marketing and consumer behavior have identified several factors that influence consumer switching in general, as illustrated in Figure 1. However, examining switching behavior between technology substitutes, especially in the case of consumer technologies, is salient for several reasons. First, the technology marketplace is extremely competitive. For most consumer needs, there is an abundance of technology choices and technology providers have to fight fiercely to introduce their products in an already saturated, and highly contested, marketplace. For example, in today's mobile technology marketplace a consumer is offered choices from a wide assortment of products and services from existing technology providers, hence making it difficult for a new provider to carve out a niche. Second, most consumer technologies are relatively easy to acquire, try out, and even abandon. For instance, today, through portals such as CNET.com a consumer can find and download several dozen options of software products for any given task. These technologies are all available at little or no expense to the consumer and hence there is low if any switching cost. Third, there is often low differentiation among various technology options. For instance, consider the differences between Internet Explorer (IE) and Firefox, both products offer very similar functionality, have similar user-interfaces, and may not be clearly differentiated by a novice user. Hence, the decision to switch from an incumbent technology solution to a substitute becomes even more interesting. Why would one switch if the two products are highly similar, and there are no obvious differences. Finally, user switching between technology products is also interesting to study because it represents a form of post-adoption behavior that is generally unexplored in the Information Systems literature. While there is an abundance of studies on technology adoption,12 only recently have researchers started to examine post-adoption issues.7 Among the studies that have examined post-adoption behavior, we believe that we are one of the first to study the switching behavior that is associated with the abandoning of one technology product in favor of a substitute.