Want to know what is going on at Marketing Scales? Read below about the newest books that have been published and other news of interest.
Product-related scales have been featured many times here probably because more of those measures have been developed by marketing scholars than anything else. In fact, some new ones were featured here over the last couple of weeks. This time, however, the focus is at a deeper level. Instead of focusing on attitudes about a product as a whole the scales drill down to specific attributes of products. That could be of interest for a variety of reasons but certainly designers need to know if a proto-type performs well on the most important decision criteria used by consumers. Such measures are also useful for consumer research after the product has been on the market for a while and yet is not selling as well as expected. New multi-item measures of the following attributes are being featured this week: comfort, durability, lightness, and softness. For more information about these scales, see the homepage.
Volume 9 of the Marketing Scales Handbook series has been published! If you are familiar with any of the past volumes, this book is generally similar in scope but the material is completely new. None of the scales in Volume 9 were reviewed in the previous books. Volume 9 has reviews of 433 scales, more than any book since Volume 6. In terms of coverage, there are scales related to typical topics such as brands, advertising, stores, purchasing, and pricing. Additionally, there are new scales for some "smaller" topics that were less covered (if at all) in the previous books such as environmentalism, service dominant orientations, symbolic embeddedness, word-of-mouth activity, switching costs, product installations, place attachment, interactions with employees, and sports. If you are interested, read more about Volume 9 and download the free sample.
For purchases by individuals, Volume 9 is only available as a paperback. Initially, it will only be available from Amazon.com or CreateSpace.com (the Amazon.com printing company).
There are now over 3,700 reviews of multi-item scales in the library here at MarketingScales.com. This is a unique database; nothing like this exists in academia or industry with respect to measures with known reliability for use in consumer behavior research. While the majority of the scales in the database have been reported in at least one of the eight published volumes of the Marketing Scales Handbook series, there are several hundred new scales that have been added to the database that have not been in any of the books. (They will be part of Volume 9 when it is published.) Further, even though Volumes 1 to 4 are no longer available, reviews of the consumer behavior scales they contained are available in the database in somewhat modified form. Finally, the reviews published in all previous volumes are updated in the database as significant new information becomes available.
The bottom line is that, as useful as any one volume in the series can be, only the library has all of the scales and with the most up-to-date information.
The books available from this site are only in digital form but Dr. Bruner has two small, scales-related paperback books available at Amazon.com. One of the books is Measuring Innovation & Technology Acceptance (2014). It provides 30 reviews from this site's database that focus on scales used in the study of innovativeness by consumers and companies. A large portion of the scales have to do with consumer attitudes and behaviors specific to high tech innovations.
The other paperback book is Marketing Scales Handbook: The Top 20 Multi-Item Measures Used in Consumer Research (2013). It is a "best of"-type book that focuses on the scales that have been used the most in scholarly consumer insight research over a 30+ year period. As might be imagined, these scales measure constructs that are among the most important in shaping consumer behavior such as attitudes toward ads and products, involvement, satisfaction, and purchase intention.
The reviews in both books are very similar in style to what is available here at this site, having descriptions of each measure (including the scale items), information about the scales' origins, their psychometric quality, and the researchers who have used them. Unlike the books from this site, the books at Amazon are relatively short and inexpensive. Both are available for Kindles now as well. More details about the contents of each book can be found at Amazon.com.
