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A total of 117 student consumers participated in a longitudinal survey of their purchasing behavior for three product categories: snack foods, CDs, and skin care. The Domain Specific Innovativeness Scale was included in the survey to measure how innovative participants were with regard to buying online. It was hypothesized that an innovative predisposition toward online buying would be associated positively with more hours of Internet use, greater Internet purchasing, higher likelihood of future Internet purchase, and use of the Internet to download music. The data analyses confirmed all these hypotheses. Few respondent demographics, however, were related to any of these variables. These results demonstrate that the Domain Specific Innovativeness Scale is a reliable and valid measure of this potentially important construct; and that Internet innovativeness functions as predicted by theories of consumer innovative behavior, thereby increasing the generalizability of these theories and yielding potentially important information for e‐commerce managers.

Three theoretical constructs that appear in many models of consumer behaviour and are of central importance to fashion marketing and management are enduring product involvement, opinion seeking and subjective product knowledge. Both basic and applied market research, however, have lacked valid, reliable and standardised measures of these variables. Recent published studies have presented multi‐item scales that fill this gap in fashion research methodology. All three scales, however, were developed using US data, chiefly students. This paper presents the results of three surveys of Korean adult (n = 479) and student (n = 387) consumers as well as US adult consumers (n = 318) that support the reliability and validity of all three scales and show their applicability for cross‐cultural fashion research.

This article reports the findings from a survey on wine use and related consumer characteristics from 271 adult US consumers. A valid and reliable self‐report scale was used to measure wine innovativeness. Multi‐item scales also measured level of wine consumption, wine involvement, opinion leadership for wine, and real and subjective wine knowledge. As hypothesised, wine innovators reported using more wine than non‐innovators. They were also found to score higher on measures of wine involvement, wine opinion leadership, and subjective wine knowledge than those consumers less likely to be wine innovators. This pattern of characteristics is similar to that found for innovative consumers of other product fields and provides insights into the characteristics of wine innovators that marketers can use to develop better strategies for innovative wine products.

The purpose of the study was to evaluate the Domain Specific Innovativeness scale (DSI) for “known‐groups validity.” Data came from two groups of student volunteers: 48 students registered for a specialty class in wine in the Hospitality Administration department of a US public university and 28 students from two marketing classes at the same institution, In addition to the DSI, the questionnaire contained multi‐item scales to measure wine involvement, opinion leadership for wine, subjective and real knowledge of wine, and wine‐related behaviour. The analysis verified that the DSI was highly correlated with the other wine measures, the two groups were quite different on all the measured wine variables, and that the DSI played a significant role in discriminating between the members of the two groups. These findings strongly support the validity of the DSI and promote its use in studies of wine innovators.

This article has been withdrawn as it was published elsewhere and accidentally duplicated. The original article can be seen here: 10.1108/10610429510097654. When citing the article, please cite: Ronald E. Goldsmith, Jon Freiden, Kenneth V. Henderson, (1995), “The impact of social values on food-related attitudes”, Journal of Product & Brand Management, Vol. 4 Iss: 4, pp. 6 - 14.

Tests ten hypotheses describing characteristics that distinguish consumers who have purchased apparel online from those who have not. A sample of 263 men and 303 women students completed a survey that measured their online and offline buying behavior, attitudes and predispositions. The results showed that the 99 online apparel buyers had more online buying experience in general. Online buyers did not differ from non‐buyers in their belief in how cheap buying online is, in their overall enjoyment of shopping, or in how often they bought clothing by any means. The demographic variables of age, sex and race were unrelated to online apparel buying. A further analysis showed that the online buyers used the Internet more hours per week and were more likely to buy online in the future than non‐buyers. The findings are consistent with previous studies of consumer Internet behavior and with consumer theory and provide guidance for e‐commerce apparel strategies.

This paper aims to test hypothesized relationships of consumer need for uniqueness, attention to social comparison information, status consumption, and role‐relaxed consumption with opinion leadership and opinion seeking for new fashionable clothing.

The authors surveyed 598 consumers between the ages of 18 and 83 years using a self‐administered questionnaire. Correlation and linear regression analyses showed that all four independent variables were related to both dependent variables.

Consumer need for uniqueness was related positively to opinion leadership, but negatively with opinion seeking for younger consumers. Attention to social comparison information was positively related more highly to opinion seeking than to opinion leadership. Status consumption had the largest overall positive association, followed by role‐relaxed consumption, which was negatively related.

Some findings confirm earlier studies and some break new ground. The findings are limited to US consumers and the convenience sample. Other limitations include the specific measures used and the cross‐section survey method precludes making causal statements. The effects of other, unmeasured variables could be assessed.

Apparel marketers seeking to encourage opinion leaders to promote their lines of new clothing might devise appeals emphasizing the social significance and status of the new fashions and how they bestow uniqueness on their wearers.

The study not only confirms previous findings regarding consumer need for uniqueness and attention to social comparison information, but expands the description of motivating factors with status and role‐relaxed consumption.

Presents findings validating French and German versions of the domain specific innovativeness scale or DSI, which was designed to measure consumer innovativeness for a specific product category. The data came from self‐administered surveys of 409 consumers in three countries: the USA (n = 121), Germany (n = 113), and France (n = 175). The study participants completed a questionnaire asking them to describe their wine‐related attitudes and behaviours. Data analysis showed that the DSI was unidimensional, high in internal consistency, positively correlated as hypothesised with wine usage (criterion validity), positively correlated as hypothesised with knowledge of and involvement with wine and uncorrelated with opinion seeking for wine (nomological validity), and unaffected by social desirability and acquiescence response styles.

The purpose of the present study was to test four hypotheses regarding the effects of viewing Web sites on Internet advertising. We surveyed a convenience sample of 329 undergraduate students, asking them to recall brand names seen on the Internet, to describe perceived advantages and disadvantages of online advertising, and to recall ads encountered in all media and whether they liked these or not. Visiting Web sites appeared to increase aided recall of brands seen on the Internet and to improve consumers’ views of the brand. Consumers who felt that Web sites improved their perceptions of brands saw more advantages in Web advertising, but they perceived more disadvantages as well. Finally, the consumers appeared to like TV and magazine ads more than the ads they recalled seeing on the Internet. The findings present a complex picture of Internet advertising that should be useful to online advertisers.

Describes the results of a survey of 281 adult women in the state of Florida. We used the 15 adjective pairs of the Malhotra self‐concept scale to measure their self‐image. A valid and reliable self‐report scale measured their fashion innovativeness, thus identifying those consumers most likely to buy new fashions after they first appear in the market. T‐tests compared the mean scores on the self‐image adjective pairs between 30 innovators and 251 later adopters. Pearson correlation analysis was also performed. The results of both analyses showed that the fashion innovators described themselves uniquely as more comfortable, pleasant, contemporary, formal, colorful, and vain than the later adopters. The results were quite consistent with an earlier published study of college students, lending confidence to this approach to profiling fashion innovators and suggesting that using self‐image could be a fruitful way to appeal to these important consumers.