Providing a New Perspective on Understanding and Measuring of Customer Inspiration by Lisa Stoll

Author:Lisa Stoll
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9783658358945
Publisher: Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden

Connection

Transformation

Activation

Brand Loyalty

How would you characterize your loyalty toward this brand ?

.562**

.267**

.455**

How does this brand compare to your ‘ideal’ brand?

.672**

.368**

.311**

Note: ** p < .01, N= 144

2.5 Discussion

Marketing researchers and practitioners are constantly searching for ways to attract consumers and turn them into loyal fans (Umashankar, Ward, & Dahl, 2017; Yim, Tse, & Chan, 2008). One promising strategy could be to inspire consumers by touching their soul, creating enthusiasm, and transforming their thoughts. Although inspiration is mainly discussed in the psychological domain (Oleynick et al., 2014; Thrash, Elliot, et al., 2010), first studies have started to examine customer inspiration, its conceptualization, antecedents, and consequences in the marketing context. The prevailing opinion sees customer inspiration as a two-factor construct with an inspired-by and inspired-to component (Böttger et al., 2017; Thrash & Elliot, 2003). However, their two-factorial view does not take into account all facets of inspiration (Study I). Inspired customers tend to be more loyal, satisfied, and prone to impulse buying (Böttger et al., 2017). A customer’s state of inspiration can even explain a higher level of intention to recycle in the context of product transformation salience (Winterich et al., 2019). The authors of these studies are important pioneers for establishing customer inspiration in the marketing literature, but there is still a long way to go to explore the full potential of customer inspiration for marketing and to better understand its importance for theory and practice.

With this study, we took a first step in this direction, and tried to expand the knowledge about this construct. We provide a tool to measure customer inspiration, which we define as the level of identification with a brand and the activation through the brand. Our purpose was to develop a theoretically and conceptually well-founded measurement model of customer inspiration for scientific purposes and for marketing practitioners. Based on a thoroughly developed definition of customer inspiration, which was deducted from expert knowledge (Study I), an index was constructed following the C-OAR-SE procedure (Rossiter, 2002). In the first part of the study, we conducted several tasks to uncover all aspects of the construct and focused on its content validity. We spoke with consumers to uncover their thoughts on inspirational experiences with brands and interviewed experts to evaluate the generated items. The second part of the study emphasized construct validity. By means of two empirical studies we refined, assessed, and validated the index of customer inspiration. This resulted in a type II measurement specification that identifies customer inspiration as a formative second-order construct of three reflective first-order components (Jarvis et al., 2003).

Based on our theoretical foundation, we assumed a three-component model as we identified three themes that specify a moment of customer inspiration, namely activation, deep connection, and personal insight. The exploratory factor analysis detected as well three dimensions within the data set. We named the first factor (or first-order construct) connection as it included items of the deep connection theme. The second factor was named transformation and it contained mainly personal insight items. We slightly modified the name of

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