Innovative consumers : who, why, and how to reach

Existing consumer innovativeness scales ignore the multitude of motivation sources of buying innovations. The objective of this paper is to incorporate motivation research into a multi-dimensional innovativeness scale to better account for the consumer-product relation. A combination of nine studies (with about 3,000 respondents in total) indicates that four types of motivations underlie consumer innovativeness: functional, hedonic, social and cognitive. The proposed 20-item 4-dimensional Motivated Consumer Innovativeness (MCI) scale proves to be reliable and internally valid and is free from social desirability bias. Moreover, the results of the studies indicate nomological and predictive validity for every MCI dimension. This new scale proves to measure more than existing Consumer Innovativeness scales: It disproves the general consensus that older people are always significantly less innovative than younger people, and the different MCI dimensions fit into a different network of relationships (i.e., a nomological network). This MCI scale can serve as a tool for future research on efficiently and effectively segmenting and targeting (motivated innovative) consumers.status: publishe