The Development of a Bi-Lingual Assessment Instrument to Measure Agentic and Communal Consumer Motives in English and French

Abstract

Consumer behavior is driven, in part, by the degree to which goods and services appeal to underlying motives for agency and communion. The purpose of this research was to develop a brief individual differences measure of these motivations for use in behavioral research and theoretical and applied consumer psychology and marketing studies. We employed a bi-lingual scale development procedure to create the 10-item Agentic and Communal Consumer Motivation Inventory (ACCMI) in English and French. Two studies show that the ACCMI is language invariant, demonstrates convergent and discriminant validity with consumer, motivational, and interpersonal constructs, and predicts evaluations of products described in agentic and communal terms, respectively, in both languages. The general conclusion of this research is that agency and communion provide a useful framework for understanding and studying consumer buying motivations. Discussion focuses on the relevance of motivational factors for studying human behavior and the applied utility of the ACCMI.

Social perception of brands: Warmth and competence define images of both brands and social groups

“…This and the SCM context effects (relational vs. analytic; Nicolas et al, 2021) thus argue for adding a congruence (fit) principle to the BIAF. In order to help managers make informed decisions about which dimensions to put forward, a scale measuring agentic and communal consumer motives has since developed (Friedman et al, 2016).…”

“…This and the SCM context effects (relational vs. analytic; Nicolas et al, 2021) thus argue for adding a congruence (fit) principle to the BIAF. In order to help managers make informed decisions about which dimensions to put forward, a scale measuring agentic and communal consumer motives has since developed (Friedman et al, 2016). This congruence principle does indeed provide a useful tool to interpret other research that has found varying importance of warmth versus competence in their impact on consumer attitudes and behaviors.…”