The savvy French consumer: a cross-cultural replication

Abstract

While French consumers' adoption of broadband may slightly lag UK and Australian uptake, their adoption of various interactive technologies is rapidly increasing. The multi-dimensional 19-item consumer SAVVY scale helps to assess consumer competency – including technological sophistication, marketing literacy, and networking – and can be used for population profiling. The scale is applied to a sample of French consumers (in French language) and a sample of UK consumers (in English). The findings indicate translational equivalence for the French-language version, as well as good fit and reasonable stability of the scale in the French and UK replications. Thus the conceptual equivalence of "savvy" across cultures is supported. However, further analysis indicates that a parsimonious 10-item measurement model in the French context may be justified. The findings have implications for conceptualisation and assessment of consumer savvy across cultures. The implications for research and practice, as well as the study limitations, are discussed.