ABSTRACT
Innovative buying is a subset of buying generally and in the context of marketing management, merits special attention only if it can be shown to be behaviourally distinct in such a way as to signal opportunities for differential marketing strategy. The innovative process is incomplete until the new product has been fully accepted and adopted by the members of relevant social and economic systems. The interest of marketing researchers and managers in customer innovation derives from this orientation but focuses upon the fact that the products involved are new in the sense of having been recently launched on to the market. The behaviour of customer innovators has received a great deal of research attention during the last decades and, concurrently, there have been numerous attempts at modelling innovative buying in order to make possible more general statements about the nature of innovativeness.
