Abstract
Consumer behavior is driven, in part, by the degree to which goods and services appeal to underlying motives for agency and communion. The purpose of this research was to develop a brief individual differences measure of these motivations for use in behavioral research and theoretical and applied consumer psychology and marketing studies. We employed a bi-lingual scale development procedure to create the 10-item Agentic and Communal Consumer Motivation Inventory (ACCMI) in English and French. Two studies show that the ACCMI is language invariant, demonstrates convergent and discriminant validity with consumer, motivational, and interpersonal constructs, and predicts evaluations of products described in agentic and communal terms, respectively, in both languages. The general conclusion of this research is that agency and communion provide a useful framework for understanding and studying consumer buying motivations. Discussion focuses on the relevance of motivational factors for studying human behavior and the applied utility of the ACCMI.
Highlights
Many factors affect why and how consumers choose products, brands, and services
A series of Principal Components Analyses (PCA) were conducted in order to (1) determine whether agency and communion dimensions could be identified in the ACCMI items and (2) identify candidate items that could be culled in the process of developing an efficient measurement tool
A test for discriminant validity showed that average variance extracted (AVE) values for the Agency dimension were 0.63 and 0.61 in the English and French language versions, while the AVE values for the Communion dimension were 0.64 and 0.50 in the English and French language versions
Summary
Many factors affect why and how consumers choose products, brands, and services. A major focus of previous research has been on consumer information processing and judgment making (Bettman, 1979; Wyer, 2008). Understanding individual differences in these motivations, in addition to general cognitive processes associated with consumption and the perceived value of a product’s attributes, would provide a fuller picture of why certain consumers prefer certain types of products and brands. Such an understanding could contribute, in turn, to assessment tools that could facilitate research on consumer psychology and be of use to companies who wish to Agentic and Communal Consumer Motives more effectively align marketing practices and communications with their customers’ motivations to acquire goods and services
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