Who are the adopters of retro-technology?

This paper studies the motivations and personality traits of retro-tech adopters. From a survey conducted on Amazon Mechanical Turk with 466 respondents, we conducted an exploratory factor analysis to establish motivational factors, and then ran a correlation analysis to determine the relationships between these motivations and the facet-level traits of the BFI-2 model. Our findings indicate that retro-tech consumers are not a homogenous adopter category, as individuals are affected by different motivations — aesthetic, fashionability, nostalgic positive emotionality, non-conformism and quality. Our study additionally suggests a cyclical conceptualisation of the diffusion of innovations model, or its extension to include a new group of retro-adopters.