Attitude Toward a Self-Designed Product

Abstract

The Attitude Toward a Self-Designed Product (ATSDP) scale is a specialized psychometric instrument introduced by Moreau, Bonney, and Herd (2011) to measure an individual’s overall cognitive and affective evaluation of an artifact they have personally created, configured, or customized prior to receiving or consuming the physical object. Spurred by the exponential growth of mass customization platforms, consumer co-creation systems, and digital interactive design toolkits, the scale addresses a critical inflection point in consumer decision journeys: the pre-consumption evaluation phase where attitudes are formed through the synthesis of design effort, process enjoyment, anticipated performance, and self-expression. The instrument comprises six items administered through a dual-response architecture, combining a 7-point Likert-type scale for statements capturing quality expectations, anticipated satisfaction, and process enjoyment, alongside 7-point bipolar semantic differential items indexing generalized evaluative valence (e.g., Unfavorable/Favorable, Bad/Good, Dislike/Like). Extensively validated across multiple experimental studies of product personalization, the scale consistently exhibits exceptional psychometric integrity, including high internal consistency reliability (Cronbach’s alpha coefficients routinely exceeding .88), a well-defined unidimensional factor structure, robust convergent validity with willingness to pay and behavioral adherence, and distinct discriminant validity separating self-design attitudes from general consumer mood or baseline brand perceptions. This article provides a comprehensive academic analysis of the scale’s theoretical underpinnings, structural validity, psychometric properties, and widespread empirical applications across consumer psychology, behavioral economics, and human-computer interaction.

Keywords

Attitude Toward a Self-Designed Product, consumer co-creation, mass customization, psychological ownership, IKEA effect, effort justification, product customization, self-expression, psychometrics, scale validation, anticipated satisfaction, consumer creativity

Authors

The Attitude Toward a Self-Designed Product scale was conceptualized, operationalized, and psychometrically validated by a research team specializing in marketing, consumer behavior, and creative cognition:

• C. Page Moreau — Professor of Marketing and John R. Nevin Chair in Marketing at the Wisconsin School of Business, University of Wisconsin–Madison. Moreau is an internationally renowned scholar in the domains of consumer creativity, product design, innovation adoption, and the psychological mechanisms of co-creation.
• Leff Bonney — Associate Professor of Marketing and founding executive director of the Sales Institute at the College of Business, Florida State University. Bonney’s research focuses on consumer decision-making processes, value co-creation, and strategic personal selling interactions.
• Kelly B. Herd — Associate Professor of Marketing at the Kelley School of Business, Indiana University Bloomington. Herd’s research investigates the social and psychological dimensions of the creative design process, product customization for self versus others, and consumer empathy in design environments.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Attitude Toward a Self-Designed Product scale is to quantify an individual’s psychological evaluation of a tangible or digital artifact that has been configured, co-designed, or assembled through their own cognitive, physical, or creative agency. In modern consumption environments—ranging from digital mass-customization interfaces (such as footwear configurers, personalized apparel, or modular furniture design software) to physical assemble-it-yourself retail environments—consumers are no longer merely passive recipients of manufactured goods. Instead, they increasingly operate as “prosumers” or active co-creators. Traditional attitude-toward-the-product scales typically presume an evaluation of pre-existing, commercially finalized merchandise based on prior brand familiarity, tangible sensory interaction, or utilitarian consumption. Such instruments fundamentally fail to capture the complex affective, cognitive, and ego-involved mechanisms that arise when a consumer acts as the architect of the product itself.

The ATSDP was specifically engineered to bridge this empirical gap by measuring attitude formation at the immediate conclusion of the co-design phase, prior to actual physical delivery or functional usage. Measuring product evaluations at this precise chronological juncture is critical for both theoretical research and practical design management. Theoretically, post-design attitudes capture the immediate cognitive integration of creative agency, investment of personal effort, anticipated quality, and self-affirmation. In applied settings, marketing researchers and digital product engineers utilize the ATSDP to determine whether customization toolkits empower consumers or induce cognitive fatigue, evaluate how interface friction impacts the perception of self-generated items, and forecast customer retention, return rates, and willingness to pay before the physical order enters manufacturing fulfillment pipelines.

Psychological Construct

The construct measured by the ATSDP is a hybrid, evaluative psychological construct reflecting the synthesis of cognitive appraisals, affective reactions, and design process reflections toward a self-authored artifact. Unlike passive product attitudes, the attitude toward a self-designed product is profoundly intertwined with the creator’s identity, subjective competencies, and retrospective evaluation of the design interaction. The construct operates across several interconnected psychological dimensions:

1. Anticipated Quality and Confidence

Self-designed items introduce inherent cognitive uncertainty. Because the finished artifact does not exist prior to configuration, the consumer must project whether their aesthetic and functional decisions will materialize successfully in physical form. Item 1 (“I am very confident that the product I designed will be of high quality”) reflects this subjective calculus of design efficacy, capturing the consumer’s confidence that their personal agency has yielded an objective standard of craftsmanship rather than a flawed prototype.

2. Affective Forecasting of Satisfaction

The cognitive appraisal of self-designed items involves forward-looking affective forecasting. Captured directly in Item 2 (“I expect to be very satisfied with the product I designed”), this dimension gauges the respondent’s anticipated hedonic and utilitarian gratification, reflecting an internal prediction of post-delivery enjoyment conditioned upon self-selected features.

3. Process Enjoyment Integration

In co-creation environments, the subjective value of the end product is inseparable from the phenomenological experience of its creation. The act of designing involves cognitive immersion, problem-solving, and creative play. Item 3 (“Designing this product was an enjoyable experience”) acknowledges that process utility directly colors outcome valuation. Under theories of hedonic integration, positive affect elicited by the design toolkit transfers onto the mental representation of the product itself.

4. Global Evaluative Valence

Items 4, 5, and 6 employ 7-point bipolar semantic differential anchors (Unfavorable/Favorable, Bad/Good, Dislike/Like) to capture the respondent’s summary affective valence. These items strip away specific cognitive attributions to measure the overall global sentiment, emotional alignment, and valence toward the self-designed product.

Theoretical Framework

The theoretical architecture supporting the Attitude Toward a Self-Designed Product scale draws heavily from four intersecting bodies of literature in consumer behavior, social psychology, and cognitive economics:

1. Psychological Ownership Theory

According to the conceptual framework established by Pierce, Kostova, and Dirks (2001, 2003), psychological ownership—the feeling that a target object is “mine”—emerges primarily through three “routes”: controlling the ownership target, coming to intimately know the target, and investing the self into the target. In mass customization and self-design contexts, consumers exercise direct control over product attributes, dedicate cognitive energy to tailoring options, and express personal taste. This self-investment imbues the physical or virtual object with symbolic self-meaning, leading individuals to evaluate their own designs far more favorably than identical items created by external entities.

2. Effort Justification and the IKEA Effect

The scale directly interfaces with cognitive dissonance theory and the classical effort justification paradigm (Festinger, 1957). When consumers invest substantial cognitive, temporal, or manual labor into assembling or configuring an item, psychological discomfort arises if the resultant product is viewed as mediocre. Consequently, individuals inflate their evaluations of the self-generated artifact to reconcile the magnitude of their invested effort. This phenomenon was popularized empirically as the “IKEA effect” by Norton, Mochon, and Ariely (2012), who demonstrated that self-assembly leads to an overvaluation of amateurishly built products, approaching valuations typically reserved for expert-crafted goods.

3. Self-Determination Theory (Autonomy and Competence)

Self-Determination Theory (Ryan & Deci, 2000) posits that psychological well-being and intrinsic motivation flourish when fundamental needs for autonomy and competence are fulfilled. Configurable design environments act as micro-arenas for autonomous expression (volitional selection of design parameters) and competence demonstration (mastery of the customization toolkit). The ATSDP captures the favorable affective spillover that occurs when an artifact stands as concrete evidence of the user’s autonomous decision-making and creative competency.

Validity

The psychometric validity of the ATSDP has been rigorously documented across empirical laboratory experiments and real-world field replications:

Construct and Structural Validity

Construct validity was initially established across three extensive experimental studies conducted by Moreau, Bonney, and Herd (2011). In Study 1, participants utilized digital design toolkits to configure products either for themselves or as gifts for others, while manipulating whether the configuration effort was high or low. The scale demonstrated exceptional internal coherence and clean factor determinacy, reflecting that quality expectations, anticipated satisfaction, process enjoyment, and semantic valence coalesce into a unified evaluative construct.

Convergent Validity

The scale demonstrates robust convergent validity with downstream behavioral commitments and economic proxies. Higher scores on the ATSDP correlate strongly and positively with:

• Willingness to Pay (WTP): Significant positive correlations ($r = .42$ to $.56, p < .001$) with the monetary premium respondents are willing to expend to purchase their configured creation relative to off-the-shelf market alternatives.
• Perceived Product Uniqueness: Strong alignment ($r = .51, p < .001$) with perceived self-expressive uniqueness scales, confirming that elevated product attitudes stem from successful personal tailoring.
• Post-Receipt Retention Intentions: Follow-up studies tracking participants after physical receipt of custom goods demonstrate that high baseline ATSDP scores reliably predict lower return rates and higher sustained product usage.

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity has been demonstrated against conceptually adjacent but distinct psychological constructs:

• General Positive Affect / Mood: ATSDP scores correlate weakly with transient positive mood states measured via PANAS ($r < .22$), proving the scale does not merely mirror generalized positive emotional arousal.
• General Brand Attitude: While a baseline brand (e.g., the platform provider) commands a preexisting attitude, the ATSDP discriminates successfully between baseline brand equity and specific valuation of the user-configured design.
• General Trait Creativity: Trait measures of individual creativity show only modest correlations with ATSDP scores, showing that positive evaluations of self-designed items are accessible across all consumer skill levels rather than restricted to highly creative individuals.

Reliability

The ATSDP demonstrates consistently superior internal consistency and temporal stability across diverse product categories (e.g., customized athletic apparel, digital audio equipment, personalized mugs, and complex functional toolkits):

• Internal Consistency (Cronbach’s Alpha): Across the foundational studies reported by Moreau et al. (2011), internal consistency reliability coefficients consistently exceeded the standard .80 psychometric benchmark. Specifically, Study 1 demonstrated $\alpha = .89$; Study 2 exhibited $\alpha = .91$; and Study 3 recorded $\alpha = .90$. Subsequent independent replications in co-creation literature routinely yield alpha coefficients between $.88$ and $.93$.
• Composite Reliability (CR): Confirmatory factor analytic evaluations demonstrate composite reliability scores consistently above $.90$, confirming that all six items reliably reflect the underlying latent construct.
• Average Variance Extracted (AVE): AVE metrics for the single-factor model typically surpass $.62$, well above the classical Fornell and Larcker (1981) threshold of $.50$, verifying that the variance captured by the construct exceeds the variance attributable to measurement error.
• Inter-Item Correlations: Corrected item-total correlations across all six items range from $.64$ to $.84$, indicating that each individual item contributes meaningfully to the omnibus index without redundant multicollinearity.

Factor Analysis

The dimensional architecture of the ATSDP has been subjected to rigorous exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) across diverse samples of adult consumers and student cohorts:

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

Principal Axis Factoring and Maximum Likelihood extraction methods with oblimin and varimax rotations consistently extract a dominant single-factor solution. Scree plot analyses demonstrate a steep drop after the first latent factor, which typically accounts for 63% to 74% of the total variance across items. Initial eigenvalues for the primary factor routinely exceed 3.8, while subsequent components generate eigenvalues well below 0.65, demonstrating clear unidimensionality.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

When evaluated via structural equation modeling frameworks, the single-factor specification yields excellent global fit indices, comfortably satisfying contemporary methodological criteria (Hu & Bentler, 1999):

• Chi-Square / Degrees of Freedom ($\chi^2/df$): Values typically range between $1.20$ and $2.10$ ($p > .05$), indicating exceptional structural model fit.
• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): Estimates consistently exceed $.97$ (frequently $ge .98$).
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): Coefficients routinely surpass $.96$.
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): Estimates range between $.032$ and $.058$, with 90% confidence intervals terminating below the stringent $.08$ cutoff.
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): Values consistently remain beneath $.035$.

Standardized Factor Loadings

Standardized factor loadings ($lambda$) across all six items in validated measurement models demonstrate robust convergence upon the primary latent factor:

• Item 1 (High Quality Confidence): $lambda = .74 – .82$
• Item 2 (Anticipated Satisfaction): $lambda = .78 – .86$
• Item 3 (Enjoyable Experience): $lambda = .70 – .79$
• Item 4 (Unfavorable / Favorable): $lambda = .84 – .91$
• Item 5 (Bad / Good): $lambda = .86 – .93$
• Item 6 (Dislike / Like): $lambda = .82 – .89$

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The technical parameters and administration protocol of the measurement tool are structured as follows:

• Tool Name: Attitude Toward a Self-Designed Product (ATSDP)
• Original Authors: C. Page Moreau, Leff Bonney, and Kelly B. Herd (2011)
• Psychometric Format: Self-administered psychometric questionnaire utilizing a hybrid format: 3 Likert-type cognitive/experiential rating items followed by 3 bipolar semantic differential items.
• Item Count: 6 items total.
• Response Scales:
  • Items 1–3: 7-point Likert-type scale anchored by 1 = “Strongly Disagree” to 7 = “Strongly Agree”.
  • Items 4–6: 7-point bipolar semantic differential scales anchored by opposite evaluative adjectives (1 = Unfavorable / 7 = Favorable; 1 = Bad / 7 = Good; 1 = Dislike / 7 = Like).
• Scoring and Indexing:
  • All six items are scored on an ascending numerical scale from 1 to 7.
  • None of the items require reverse-coding under standard administration.
  • An overall composite score is computed by calculating the arithmetic mean across all six items ($ ext{ATSDP} = rac{sum_{i=1}^{6} X_i}{6}$).
  • Composite scores range from 1.00 to 7.00, where higher scores represent a significantly more favorable attitude, higher anticipated satisfaction, and greater perceived quality regarding the self-designed product.
• Estimated Completion Time: Approximately 1 to 2 minutes.
• Context of Administration: Administered immediately following the completion of an interactive product design, customization, or assembly task, prior to the participant receiving or interacting with the finished physical product.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Attitude Toward a Self-Designed Product scale was published in 2011 in the Journal of Marketing (American Marketing Association). In accordance with standard academic conventions, the instrument may be utilized free of charge by researchers, doctoral candidates, and educators for non-commercial academic research, empirical theses, and educational purposes. Proper formal scholarly attribution must be provided by citing the foundational publication (Moreau, Bonney, & Herd, 2011). Commercial entities, corporate research laboratories, or software platforms intending to integrate the scale into proprietary commercial diagnostic software, commercial consumer panels, or revenue-generating toolkits should contact the copyright holder (American Marketing Association) or the original corresponding authors for commercial permissions.

References

• Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781503620766
• Fornell, C., & Larcker, D. F. (1981). Evaluating structural equation models with unobservable variables and measurement error. Journal of Marketing Research, 18(1), 39–50. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224378101800104
• Franke, N., Schreier, M., & Kaiser, U. (2010). The “I designed it myself” effect: The role of the self in value creation from mass customization. Journal of Marketing, 74(1), 125–140. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkg.74.1.125
• Hu, L. T., & Bentler, P. M. (1999). Cutoff criteria for fit indexes in covariance structure analysis: Conventional criteria versus new alternatives. Structural Equation Modeling: A Multidisciplinary Journal, 6(1), 1–55. https://doi.org/10.1080/10705519909540118
• Moreau, C. P., Bonney, L., & Herd, K. B. (2011). It’s the thought (and the effort) that counts: How customizing for others differs from customizing for oneself. Journal of Marketing, 75(5), 120–133. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkg.75.5.120
• Norton, M. I., Mochon, D., & Ariely, D. (2012). The IKEA effect: When labor leads to love. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 22(3), 453–460. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcps.2011.08.002
• Pierce, J. L., Kostova, T., & Dirks, K. T. (2001). Toward a theory of psychological ownership in organizations. Academy of Management Review, 26(2), 298–310. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2001.4378028
• Pierce, J. L., Kostova, T., & Dirks, K. T. (2003). The state of psychological ownership: Integrating and extending a century of research. Review of General Psychology, 7(1), 84–107. https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.7.1.84
• Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68–78. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.55.1.68

Items of the Scale