Consumer savvy: conceptualisation and measurement

Abstract

The notion of savvy consumers increasingly appears in the e-marketing and e-management literatures, usually in discussions about the importance of consumer-centricity. A synthesis of the literature identifies six broad characteristics of these savvy consumers: they are enabled by competencies in relation to technological sophistication, interpersonal networking, online networking and marketing/advertising literacy, and they are empowered by consumer self-efficacy and by their expectations of firms. This understanding of consumers is formalised by developing a SAVVY scale. Standard scale development procedures are applied using a sample from an online panel of consumers. As part of the process of validating the new scale, comparisons are made with related, established scales – focusing on measures of consumer advantage (persuasion knowledge and market mavens) and consumer disadvantage (confusion arising from over-choice and vulnerability at the shopping interface). Our findings show the value of formal, empirically-grounded measures of consumer savvy, something that has been absent from many previous commentaries on the characteristics of savvy new consumers.