Independent Consumers And Their Brands

Consumer independence describes indifference to the social influence of others. Brand engagement in self-concept represents how much consumers use brands to form and to display their self-concepts. Both individual difference variables and their respective scales are new to the field of marketing and consumer research. Consequently, it is important to evaluate their psychometric characteristics. As consumer independence increases, consumers should be increasingly indifferent to the social image their brand choice conveys and thus be unconcerned with what brands say about them. This paper presents the results of three studies, two in the U.S. and one in Korea, verifying that, as expected, consumer independence and brand engagement in self-concept are unrelated, testifying to the nomological validity of both concepts. Moreover, all three studies found the multi-items scales to be unidimensional and internally consistent