Innovations—Doomed to Fail? Investigating Strategies to Overcome Passive Innovation Resistance

The constant and successful market introduction of new products is of major concern to companies throughout all industries. However, empirical research points to high failure rates of innovations, indicating that most new products fail as they are rejected by consumers due to their resistance to innovation. Several studies have confirmed the importance of passive innovation resistance as a dominant barrier, which has to be overcome before new product adoption can start. However, empirical evidence on how to overcome passive innovation resistance is still lacking. This study intends to address this gap by evaluating the effectiveness of marketing instruments (i.e., mental simulation and benefit comparison) to reduce negative effects of passive innovation resistance on new product adoption. The results of a scenario‐based experiment ( n = 679) confirm high effectiveness for both instruments. However, the effectiveness varied with the type of passive innovation resistance present. More specifically, mental simulation was found to be the most effective instrument in the case of cognitive passive resistance, whereas benefit comparison was found to be most effective in the case of situational passive resistance. Thereby, the effect of both marketing instruments was stronger the more radical the new product was perceived. Hence, companies should assess the type of passive innovation resistance that is predominant in their target market, and align their choice of marketing instruments that accompany a new product launch to most effectively overcome passive innovation resistance. Employing such new product launch tactics should decrease initial market resistance and thus help companies in reducing innovation failure rates.