Motivated Consumer Innovativeness: Validation and Moderation

The objective of this follow-up paper was to further validate the new Motivated Consumer Innovativeness (MCI) scale of Vandecasteele and Geuens (2008), which takes four encompassing motivations to buy innovations into account. A combination of six studies (with about 2,500 respondents in total) confirmed the dimensionality, reliability and internal validity of the scale and its four dimensions. MCI did not suffer from social desirability bias. Moreover, the results of the studies indicate nomological and predictive validity for every MCI dimension. The final 4-dimensions MCI scale consists of 20-items and proves to measure more than existing Consumer Innovativeness scales: (1) it disproves the general consensus that older people are always significantly less innovative than younger people; (2) the different MCI dimensions fit into a different network of relationships (i.e., nomological network); (3) differently motivated innovative consumers attach greater importance to different values, and finally, (4) differently motivated innovative consumers have a different media usage.