The difference novelty makes: incidental exposure to unfamiliar stimuli primes exploratory behavior

Understanding what makes consumers more likely to explore new products is of crucial importance to marketers. Prior research on consumer innovativeness has focused on identifying stable individual characteristics that determine the propensity of consumers to try new offerings. The present research takes a different perspective by investigating the role of contextual factors on consumer innovativeness. We propose that situational exposure to novelty primes exploratory behavior that carries over to subsequent unrelated choice tasks. Three studies demonstrate these effects and investigate their consequences.