Consumption can be an intrinsic aspiration, one that fosters personal growth and well-being when consumers acquire knowledge about products that truly interest them. We call this Consumer Self-development, which occurs when consumption increases consumption knowledge, self-knowledge, and perceived competence.
Scale prompts and items:
Answer the following questions on a scale of 1 (Strongly Disagree) to 7 (Strongly Agree). Engaging with [insert product or brand] would allow me to:
1. Gain knowledge, that I did not have before, about new products
2. Become more well-informed about the product category
3. Develop a better understanding of how a product was created
4. Expand your sense of the kind of person you are
Illustrated in the Figure 1, we developed a measure of consumer self-development, across 10 steps, following the best practices for the methods of scale development (Churchill, 1979; Boateng et al. 2018) and the statistics of psychometric validation (Flora 2018). To summarize Steps 1-3, we wrote an initial pool of 22 items based on the literature on personal growth and established content validity. In Steps 4-6, we recruited an ecologically-valid sample of real customers, which represented our target population, and conducted preliminary analyses for item reduction and factor structure. In Steps 7-9, we confirmed the three-factor structure and established construct validity. In Step 10, to demonstrate scale application, we (i) establish that our scale has predictive validity for meaningful customer outcomes across their decision making and well-being and (ii) expand the nomological network of consumer self-development by uncovering causal antecedents that marketers can foster.
