Wine Involvement Research Articles

Identifying Wine Innovators: A Test of the Domain Specific Innovativeness Scale Using Known Groups

The purpose of the study was to evaluate the Domain Specific Innovativeness scale (DSI) for “known‐groups validity.” Data came from two groups of student volunteers: 48 students registered for a specialty class in wine in the Hospitality Administration department of a US public university and 28 students from two marketing classes at the same institution, In addition to the DSI, the questionnaire contained multi‐item scales to measure wine involvement, opinion leadership for wine, subjective and real knowledge of wine, and wine‐related behaviour. The analysis verified that the DSI was highly correlated with the other wine measures, the two groups were quite different on all the measured wine variables, and that the DSI played a significant role in discriminating between the members of the two groups. These findings strongly support the validity of the DSI and promote its use in studies of wine innovators.

Some Characteristics of Wine Innovators

This article reports the findings from a survey on wine use and related consumer characteristics from 271 adult US consumers. A valid and reliable self‐report scale was used to measure wine innovativeness. Multi‐item scales also measured level of wine consumption, wine involvement, opinion leadership for wine, and real and subjective wine knowledge. As hypothesised, wine innovators reported using more wine than non‐innovators. They were also found to score higher on measures of wine involvement, wine opinion leadership, and subjective wine knowledge than those consumers less likely to be wine innovators. This pattern of characteristics is similar to that found for innovative consumers of other product fields and provides insights into the characteristics of wine innovators that marketers can use to develop better strategies for innovative wine products.