Motivated Consumer Innovativeness: Concept, measurement, and validation

Abstract

Existing consumer innovativeness scales ignore the multitude of motivation sources of buying innovations. The objective of this paper is to incorporate different motivations into a multi-dimensional innovativeness scale to better account for the consumer–product relationship. An extensive literature review and five studies (with about 2600 respondents in total) indicate that four types of motivation underlie consumer innovativeness: functional, hedonic, social, and cognitive. The proposed 20-item four-dimensional Motivated Consumer Innovativeness (MCI) scale proves to be reliable and internally valid and does not seem to suffer from social desirability bias. Moreover, the results of the studies indicate the predictive validity of every MCI dimension. This new scale proves to measure more than existing consumer innovativeness scales; the different MCI dimensions predict innovative purchase intentions better than both traditional and recently developed innovativeness scales, and they disprove the general consensus that older people are always significantly less innovative than younger people. This MCI scale can serve as a tool for future research on efficiently and effectively segmenting and targeting (motivated innovative) consumers.