Exploring the adoption process of personal technologies: A cognitive-affective approach

The impact of cognitive and emotional factors on the customer's decision to adopt a new technology has long been at the core of innovation and marketing literature. Today, the proliferation of personal technologies makes the understanding of the adoption process of such innovations a vital issue. This article, moving from long-established technology adoption theories, integrates affective factors to propose a comprehensive framework to interpret and orient innovation and marketing approaches of companies. To do this, we review a rich literature from the domains of management, information systems, marketing and cognitive psychology, identifying six possible sources of perceived value for personal technologies, hence attitude to adopt them: functional value, monetary value, social value, entertainment value, epistemic value and aesthetic value. After defining and framing them in the extant literature, we discuss how the framework may be adopted in practice to support Companies' strategies in the surprisingly under-explored industry of personal technologies.