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Consumer adoption of community-focused smart products: the moderating role of political ideology

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  • Du, Shuili
  • Zhao, Min
  • Sen, Sankar

Abstract

Many smart products (e.g., the navigation app Waze, smart doorbell Ring, and fitness tracker Fitbit) incorporate community features to attract consumers. This research investigates how political ideology influences consumer reactions to such community-focused smart products. Drawing on moral foundations theory that liberals endorse individualizing principles of care, prevention of harm, and fairness whereas conservatives value binding principles of ingroup loyalty and authority/respect, we argue that liberals and conservatives are likely to show divergent reactions to a smart product’s community focus, which foregrounds collective group benefits juxtaposed with heightened data privacy vulnerability. Across one survey of real users of Alexa and Waze and two controlled experiments using a smart video doorbell, we find consistent evidence that conservatives, relative to liberals, exhibit higher adoption of community-focused (versus personal-focused) smart products. Further, our findings reveal data privacy attitude as a key underlying mechanism for these ideology-based differences in consumer adoption of community-focused smart products. By highlighting the important roles of political ideology and data privacy attitude in consumer adoption of smart products, this work contributes to research on smart product adoption, political ideology, and data privacy.

Suggested Citation

  • Du, Shuili & Zhao, Min & Sen, Sankar, 2026. "Consumer adoption of community-focused smart products: the moderating role of political ideology," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 206(C).
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:jbrese:v:206:y:2026:i:c:s014829632500774x
    DOI: 10.1016/j.jbusres.2025.115951
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    References listed on IDEAS

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