Ladders to m-commerce resistance: A qualitative means-end approach

Although mobile commerce is predicted to be the next megatrend with steadily increasing buyer rates, some industries are struggling to adopt this trend and face strong consumer resistance. This particularly concerns complex, service based products such as insurance. The long sales tradition in this area, with a network of agents, brokers and bank advisors, has caused a perceived divergence between the characteristics of the established and the emerging channels. This article aims to identify the sources of resistance to mobile insurance by uncovering the relationship between the values of consumers and the conflicting attributes of the mobile channel. Therefore, insurance consumers with existing knowledge about mobile insurance, but inherent resistance were interviewed. A laddering interviewing technique was used to retrieve chains of attribute, consequence and value relations. This provides a profound understanding of the consumers' cognitions by mapping and structuring the sources of resistance. The results mainly highlight an insufficiency of the service, and system components as key barriers to adoption. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.