When a Reputation for Innovativeness Confers Negative Consequences for Brands

To date, academic research has uniformly discussed the positive consequences that a reputation for innovativeness can have for brands and/or firms. We extend this work by demonstrating that a reputation for innovativeness can have negative consequences in certain contexts. Specifically, we show evidence that when a brand has a reputation for innovativeness (vs. the absence of this reputation), consumers perceive products from that brand as being more likely to malfunction in contexts where functional risk concerns are relevant. We demonstrate that this shift in anticipated malfunction negatively affects both product quality perceptions and purchase likelihood. Further, we demonstrate four theoretically grounded conditions under which this counter-intuitive effect occurs, and in doing so offer implications for both theory and practice. In addition, we discuss several explanations to reconcile our findings with prior literature.