Initiating actor engagement with novel products

Abstract

While organizations continue to face extensive pressure to introduce novel products to the market, the question of how customers initiate engagement with novel products remains unanswered. This article draws on the ecosystem perspective of engagement, utilizing the lens of actor engagement, to develop a conceptual framework for actor engagement with novel products. It elaborates our understanding of the indirect interaction that actors have with a focal object through other actors. It demonstrates that through vicarious learning, actors establish cognitive, emotional, behavioral, and social interactions with the novel product. Further, it explicates a process in which legitimacy judgments, at the micro- and macrolevels, play a central role in facilitating and evaluating engagement with products. This framework offers an important contribution to theory by elucidating the facilitating role of learning and introducing the concept of legitimacy to the engagement literature. A set of propositions is presented, and a future research agenda proposed for each of these propositions.