Factors Influencing Consumer Resistance to Innovation: Relationship between Relative Advantage, Attitude towards Existing Product, Social Influence and Self-Efficacy

INTRODUCTION:The overall Smartphone users are recorded as 3 billion noticeable in late 2007, more than 4 billion in 2008 and is currently anticipated that will cross 5.5 billion before the end of 2013. Mobile innovation developing quickly in which a sum of 4 billion smartphone users around the globe has been recorded in mid-2011. As indicated by Digitalbuzz, (2011), 57% of the worldwide population or 1.08 billion users have a particular personal digital assistant (PDA). Over the previous years, the majority of innovation in the overall users "base is r elied upon to keep on coming from the Asia Pacific Region, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America (Worldwide Mobile Market, 2009). Mobile phone technology, as telephones, tablets, and notepads, is bringing about a significant improvement and building our lives better than ever before. It does this from numerous points of view, not the minimum of which is making contacts or emails schedule. We can be in contact with those, to whom we want to reach, whether work-related or personal in nature (Kendrick, 2013). Four years from now, 5.1 billion individuals will be Smartphone users around the globe - nearly 1 billion more mobile users than the 4.3 billion individuals overall making use of them now. Asia, the area that will see the most development, is currently home to the most smartphone users. Around 2.4 billion individuals, their use of smartphones, a figure anticipated to develop to 2.9 billion by 2017 (Zone Fox, 2013). Specifically in Pakistan, mobile phones are regarded an important communication tool and have become an essential component of the Pakistani society (Iqbal, 2013). The Telecom sector all around the world, especially in Pakistan has experienced a tremendous growth in the last few years up till 2012. However this pace reduced significantly in 2013, due to the heavy taxes imposed by the caretaker and the new government. The industry registered a total mobile subscriber base of 122.127 million in March 2013, which was the strongest net addition since November 2012 (Iqbal, 2013). The latest shift in mobile phone innovations is towards a mobile device consolidating all consumer electronic gadget, like MP3 player, camera, Internet (computer), GPS and even TV. A new stock phrase "SMARTPHONE" (marketing-friendly term) represents this widely known PDA-Cell phone combination (PDA-Phone combo) with multifold functions defining a radical innovation in mobile phone industry (Park & Chen, 2007)Smartphone manufacturers have been unable to increase the market shares by simply reducing the prices, so the price itself may not be the main reason for its low market share. Nokia corporation interim report (2013) reported that Nokia group net sales for the first half 2013 decreased 22% year on year.This condition brings us to a new significant aspect and this is less studied as well as ignored aspect of innovation challenges, i.e. the consumers" resistance. As the Smartphone's represent "radical innovation" it faces far great consumers resistance than "incremental innovation" (Garcia et al. , 2007, Heiskanen et al. , 2007). Consumers who create resistance to innovation are mostly non -adopters and are comprised of major part of the consumer. These consumers have a strong potential for supplying valuable information necessary for the development, implementation, and to the commercialization of innovation, and it should be given more attention in the research studies (Laukkanen et al., 2008). In the managerial perspective, to study consumers' resistance to innovation is very important and very useful. Resistance understanding will help companies design/develop new products in order to ensure the success of a product on the market, and will help reduce the high failure rate. Once the firms face the consumers' resistance to their innovations, they can examine the underlying causes of the resistance, and be better able to design strategies for coping with critical and important factors of resistance (Ram, 1987). …