Abstract
As consumers have transformed into influential entities in the recent consumption environment, a new concept is needed to describe their characteristics. This study adopts Ryou and Ahn (2018)’s comprehensive approach which integrated innovativeness, opinion leadership,emergent nature, market mavenship, consumer savvy,self-disclosure, and lead-userness to account for consumer smartness. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to identify the consumer smartness and examine how it is related to demographic and behavioral characteristics. A professional online survey company which secures over 1.3 million consumer panels nationwide in Korea was hired to collect the data. A total of 309 consumers responded to the self-administered questionnaires asking about their consumer smartness (Ryou & Ahn, 2018), demographics, and shopping behavior online. Based on the diverse concepts of consumer traits, this study attempts to identify dimensions of consumer smartness and examine its relationship to demographic and behavioral characteristics. First, this study empirically extracted six traits of consumer smartness: innovativeness, opinion leadership, self-disclosure,dissatisfaction, technology acceptance, and marketing literacy. Also, this study found its meaningful relationship to consumer smartness and demographic characteristics and shopping behavior. This result implies that smart consumers are not only buyers who buy more than non-smart consumers, but also are potential influencers who have the power to affect others’ decisions by sharing information.
Highlights
A total of 309 consumers responded to the selfadministered questionnaires asking about their consumer smartness (Ryou & Ahn, 2018), demographics, and shopping behavior online using a six-point Likert scale ranging from strongly disagree (1) to strongly agree (6)
Multiple Chi-square tests verify the differences between groups with low and high consumer smartness
Consumer smartness includes innovativeness (38.495% of variance, α=.908) which means the tendency of buying or using a new product, or brand as soon as it becomes available; opinion leadership (10.345% of variance, α=.889) which represents the ability to influence public opinion on shopping; self-disclosure (9.080% of variance, α=.871) which refers to the tendency of sharing information on shopping with other consumers; and dissatisfaction (7.658% of variance, α=.876) in which consumers are dissatisfied with the existing products or shopping systems and expect potential benefits
Summary
Ahn, and Forney (2014) introduced smart consumer experience portraying consumers who are empowered, networked, and engaged in digital environments. These consumers create, share, and demand a smart experience which capitalizes on their social structure, relationships, and knowledge. Many researchers and practitioners have been aware of the new consumers, they have mainly focused on specific features such as emergent nature (Hoffman, Kopalle, & Novak, 2010), market mavenship (Barnes & Pressey, 2012; Goldsmith, Flynn, & Goldsmith, 2003; Ruvio & Shoham, 2007), consumer savvy (Macdonald & Uncles, 2007) and lead-userness (Franke, Hippel, & Schreier, 2006; Lüthje & Herstatt, 2004; Schuhmacher & Kuester, 2012) in addition to innovativeness and opinion leadership (Flynn, Goldsmith, & Eastman, 1996), which limits considering the multifaceted characteristics of smart consumers who play multiple roles in the consumption environment. The purpose of this study is to identify the consumer smartness and examine how it is related to demographic and behavioral characteristics
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