Consumer's Relationships with Technologies
Description
Susan M. Fournier is involved with two lines of research investigating consumers' relationships with technological products. The first project (with Professor David Mick of the University of Wisconsin) concerns 'everyday technologies' such as microwave ovens, videocassette recorders, answering machines, and home computers. This multiphase study, which involves the collection of both cross-sectional and longitudinal case study data, reveals the paradoxical nature of consumers' relationships with technological goods (e.g., as captured by such dialectical themes as freedom/enslavement, control/chaos, efficiency/inefficiency) and the ongoing coping strategies consumers engage to manage the stresses that ensue from such conflicted and ambivalent feelings. This research has been particularly informative about customer satisfaction theory, suggesting a meaning-based contingency framework of multiple models and modes of satisfaction to replace the dominant expectations-disconfirmation paradigm. The findings, which implicate the quality of consumers' lives in technoculture and the feelings consumers develop towards the marketing function, also have ramifications for relationship marketing theory and practice.
Fournier is also conducting research (with Professor John Deighton of Harvard Business School) that investigates consumers' adoption of and post-purchase experiences with one specific leading edge technology: on-line grocery shopping. The study employs a longitudinal design, following a panel of innovator and early adopter on-line subscribers through their first year of service usage. The study attempts to inform theories of new product adoption and diffusion, both within the individual and within and outside the household through its unique in-depth look at the evolution of technology usage over time.