Motivated Consumer Innovativeness:
Concept, Measurement and Validation
Abstract
Functional, hedonic, social and cognitive motivations, which are incorporated in a new Motivated Consumer Innovativeness scale, underlie consumer innovativeness. These reliable and valid scale dimensions predict innovative purchase intentions better than traditional and recent innovativeness scales. Moreover, the scale disproves the consensus that age is always negatively related to innovativeness.
Extended abstract
Since the early seventies, several researchers have tried to predict consumers’ innovative buying behavior by means of different scales intended to measure innovativeness as a personality trait. However, most previous research disregards the consumer-product relation (Gatignon and Robertson 1985; Goldsmith and Flynn 1992) and ignores the different motivation sources. By constructing a new Consumer Innovativeness scale which incorporates a diversity of underlying goals and motivations for buying an innovation, we take the notion of product-consumer interactions in Consumer Innovativeness one step further: Consumers differ not only in level of innovativeness (i.e., personality trait of consumers) but also in type of innovativeness (i.e., motivations to buy the innovation).
Consumer innovativeness is “the tendency to buy new products in a particular product category soon after they appear in the market and relatively earlier than most other consumers in the market segment” (Foxall, Goldsmith, and Brown 1998, 41). This personality trait should provide an explanatory basis for innovative buying behavior, however, predictive validity still is problematic with the existing innovativeness scales (Im, Bayus, and Mason 2003). By including a wider spectrum of motivations, we are able to construct an innovativeness scale that performs better both in terms of content validity and predictive validity. Moreover, it may help marketing researchers and managers to identify and reach the motivated innovative consumer for their innovation more effectively.
We base our conceptualization on general motivation, goal and value taxonomies (Ford and Nichols 1987; Schwartz 1992) and can conclude that at least four motivational dimensions are of importance for Consumer Innovativeness: (1) Functionally Motivated Consumer Innovativeness (fMCI) is Consumer Innovativeness motivated by the functional performance of innovations which focus on task management and accomplishment improvement. (2) Hedonically Motivated Consumer Innovativeness (hMCI) is Consumer Innovativeness motivated by an affective or sensory stimulation and gratification. (3) Socially Motivated Consumer Innovativeness (sMCI) is Consumer Innovativeness motivated by the self-assertive social need for differentiation. And finally, (4) Cognitively Motivated Consumer Innovativeness (cMCI) is Consumer Innovativeness motivated by stimulation of the mind. These four motives often recur in general consumer behavior literature (Rossiter and Percy 1997; Sweeney and Soutar 2001), innovativeness literature (Arnould 1989; Fisher and Price 1992; Simonson and Nowlis 2000; Voss, Spangenberg, and Grohmann 2003) or different innovativeness scales (Baumgartner and Steenkamp 1996; Roehrich 1994; Venkatraman and Price 1990), however, hardly any innovativeness scale has been developed that includes a wider array of potential consumer motives.
We develop a 20-item 4-dimensional MCI scale based on a combination of eight studies (with about 2,600 respondents in total).
We start with an item pool of 254 items, based on literature review, existing Consumer Innovativeness scales, exploratory interviews and an exploratory quantitative study with 279 respondents who had to indicate to what extent 135 human motives (Chulef, Read, and Walsh 2001) are applicable to the purchase of innovations. Based on expert and consumer judgments of all items, taking content validity, representativeness, dimensionality, comprehensibility, and unambiguousness into account, 90 items remain. These 90 items are included in an online survey with 452 respondents. Based on principal component analyses and confirmatory factor analysis taking scale development procedures of Netemeyer, Bearden, and Sharma (2003) into account, we can reduce the pool to 30 items, and can confirm the 4 MCI factors. These factors prove to possess high internal validity, sufficient discriminant validity, composite reliability, and average variance extracted. Furthermore, the 4-factor correlated model results in an acceptable overall fit and proves to be the best model. Moreover, we can prove convergent validity with Roehrich’s (1994) Hedonic and Social Consumer Innovativeness scale, and discriminant validity with Baumgartner and Steenkamp’s (1996) Exploratory Acquisition of Products scale and Eysenck, Eysenck, and Barrett’s (1985) Extraversion scale.
We further refine the scale with a new survey including the 30 MCI items. Based on similar procedures, we have to remove 10 extra items, resulting in the 20 final MCI items. Again, the fit indices indicate a good model, which outperforms other models. In addition, MCI proves to be stable over time, as we can prove test-retest reliability. Moreover, MCI is not sensitive to social desirability bias.
Finally, an innovativeness scale also needs to predict innovative consumer behavior in everyday life. We check this with two studies: First, a predictive validity study is set up with fictitious innovations, which are manipulated towards the four innovativeness motivations. Moreover, as we add two existing general innovativeness scales to the survey, we can verify whether MCI performs better in predicting innovative behavior than existing scales. Second, we have another study with a list of existing innovations. Both studies prove that there is a unique relation between each motivation dimension and the attitude, the buying intentions or buying behavior of consumers regarding innovations that satisfy these specific functional, hedonic, social or cognitive needs. Moreover, we prove that MCI predicts innovation buying behavior better than the traditional Cognitive and Sensory Innovativeness scale of Venkatraman and Price (1990), and the recently developed Global Consumer Innovativeness scale of Tellis, Yin, and Bell (2009).
To conclude, this four-dimensional Consumer Innovativeness scale consisting of a hedonic, functional, social, and cognitive dimension is useful for several reasons. First, the eight studies show that the dimensionality, reliability, convergence, discriminant, and predictive validity of MCI prove satisfactory. Second, MCI measures more than existing Consumer Innovativeness scales: (1) MCI not only measures the intensity of Consumer Innovativeness, but also its origin. (2) MCI keeps the middle ground between existing general innovativeness scales, which are unimpressive in predicting innovative buying behavior, and the domain-specific innovativeness of Goldsmith and Hofacker (1991), which is product-specific and thus not very practical, leading to a better performance in terms of predicting innovative behavior. (3) Moreover, MCI disproves the general consensus that younger people are more innovative than older people: Older people are as innovative as younger people as far as functional innovations are concerned. As most existing innovativeness scales focus on hedonic and social innovativeness, and older people are less hedonically and socially motivated to buy innovations, these scales are not able to capture the innovativeness of older people.
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