1. Abstract
The Purchase Motivation (Promoting Company Equality) scale is a psychometric and consumer-behavior measurement instrument designed to capture the extent to which consumers’ intentions to buy a product or service are driven by ideological, pro-social, and moral goals—specifically the ambition to support and advance equity, diversity, and structural parity within corporate ecosystems. Developed and operationalized in contemporary consumer psychology research by Acar, Dahl, Fuchs, and Schreier (2021) within the context of market signaling and alternative financing models (such as crowdfunding), this instrument addresses the intersection between corporate governance, corporate social responsibility (CSR), and political consumerism.
The scale specifically quantifies consumer motives that extend beyond conventional utilitarian utility (such as functional quality, price economy, and physical durability) and hedonic satisfaction, isolating the psychological mechanism of values-driven brand alliance. Methodologically, the instrument uses a comparative relative-evaluation format, mirroring companion assessment blocks for product quality and purchase interest to gauge how organizational characteristics (e.g., decentralized funding, grassroots ownership, egalitarian workplace structures, or representative leadership) activate supportive consumer behavior. Psychometric evaluations demonstrate strong internal consistency (with reported Cronbach’s alpha values regularly exceeding .85 across experimental replications), robust convergent validity with scales measuring general prosocial consumption and ethical purchasing, and clear discriminant validity from purely quality-driven or status-seeking purchase motivations. This article provides an exhaustive evaluation of the scale’s theoretical underpinnings, psychometric validity, dimensional architecture, analytical considerations, and practical research utilities.
2. Keywords
Purchase Motivation, Corporate Equality, Consumer Psychology, Prosocial Consumption, Signaling Theory, Crowdfunding, Market Signaling, Ethical Consumerism, Diversity and Inclusion, Psychometrics, Corporate Social Responsibility, Brand Equity
3. Authors
The empirical operationalization of this measure was formalized by a collaborative team of international scholars in marketing science and consumer behavior:
- Oguz A. Acar: Professor of Marketing and Innovation, Bayes Business School (formerly Cass), City, University of London, United Kingdom. Specializes in consumer innovation, crowdsourcing, customer co-creation, and behavioral decision-making.
- Darren W. Dahl: BC Children’s Hospital Professor in Marketing and Dean of the Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia, Canada. Internationally renowned expert in consumer creativity, moral decision-making, and social influence.
- Christoph Fuchs: Professor of Marketing at the TUM School of Management, Technical University of Munich, Germany, and Visiting Professor at the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University. Expert in customer empowerment, user innovation, and societal implications of production technologies.
- Martin Schreier: Professor of Marketing and Head of the Department of Marketing at WU Vienna (Vienna University of Economics and Business), Austria. Renowned for pioneer research into user innovation, crowd-based enterprise, and consumer-perceived authenticity.
4. Purpose
Modern consumers increasingly perceive every commercial transaction as an implicit ballot cast in favor of an organization’s social, ethical, and organizational profile. The purpose of the Purchase Motivation (Promoting Company Equality) scale is to empirically isolate and measure the degree to which an individual’s commercial patronage is activated by an intrinsic or extrinsic desire to rectify market asymmetries, empower marginalized or underrepresented corporate actors, and advance workplace and organizational equality.
Historically, classic economic theories presumed consumers functioned as purely rational actors optimizing personal utility functions dictated by performance, aesthetics, or economic price. While contemporary consumer research expanded this view to incorporate social identity and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), empirical tools frequently conflated general corporate ethics (e.g., environmental sustainability or fair wages) with targeted consumer aspirations to alter competitive landscapes in favor of egalitarian entities. This scale directly remedies this gap by focusing sharply on the motivational impulse to support structural equity within business operations.
In experimental and empirical marketing research, the instrument serves several pivotal purposes:
- Isolating Mechanisms of the Crowdfunding Signal: As demonstrated by Acar et al. (2021), alternative venture pathways—such as crowdfunding—communicate distinct informational signals to prospective buyers. Beyond signaling innovative design, crowdfunding signals market democratization and grassroots empowerment. The scale empirically establishes whether heightened purchase likelihood stems from perceived superior engineering or an ideological urge to support market-level equality.
- Distinguishing Symbolic from Functional Consumption: The instrument facilitates structural equation models and mediation analyses, enabling researchers to disentangle consumers’ functional quality appraisals from their moral and identity-based purchase motives.
- Evaluating Brand Activism and DEI Initiatives: For commercial strategists and corporate communication researchers, the scale provides a quantitative metric to evaluate consumer response to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) disclosures, identifying consumer segments whose buying behavior responds systematically to egalitarian organizational designs versus those indifferent to such corporate attributes.
5. Psychological Construct
The construct captured by this instrument is multidimensional in its psychological roots, synthesizing elements of identity theory, moral psychology, and goal-directed behavioral theory, yet operationalized as a focused, unidimensional motivational construct within experimental comparative batteries.
At its core, Purchase Motivation Driven by Promoting Company Equality represents an intentional consumer orientation wherein the decision to acquire a good or service is purposefully framed as a vehicle for supporting fair institutional practices, equal resource allocation, and representative corporate governance. This construct differs systematically from related theoretical concepts:
- Altruism vs. Market-Mediated Solidarity: Pure altruism involves voluntary assistance to others with negligible direct benefit or commercial exchange. In contrast, equality-driven purchase motivation operates within the commercial domain, synthesizing utility consumption with political and moral agency. Consumers actively select among competing products to advance a vision of organizational justice.
- Egalitarian Goal Activation: Grounded in goal-directed behavior, this construct reflects the mental activation of fairness goals. When a firm’s operational narrative highlights egalitarian hiring, shared profit distribution, cooperative ownership, or grassroots funding, consumers with activated equality goals experience heightened motivation to patronize the firm as a means of goal fulfillment.
- Signaled Social Justice Identity: Drawing from social identity theory, consumers express personal and social identities through brand association. Supporting equal-opportunity businesses allows consumers to reinforce an egalitarian self-concept and communicate moral alignment to external peers.
The operational construct specifically assesses the relative weight consumers place on organizational parity, fair compensation, democratic capital raising, and non-exploitative corporate hierarchies when comparing two or more alternative products in the marketplace.
6. Theoretical Framework
The development of the Purchase Motivation (Promoting Company Equality) scale is anchored primarily in three foundational theoretical pillars: Signaling Theory, Social Identity and Self-Verification Theory, and the Theory of Planned Behavior.
1. Signaling Theory (Spence, 1973)
Originally formulated in economics by Michael Spence (1973), signaling theory posits that under conditions of information asymmetry, actors produce credible, observable signals to convey unobservable qualities. In modern consumer research, how a company brings a product to market, sources its raw materials, or structures its ownership operates as a rich informational signal.
Acar et al. (2021) demonstrated that when a product is characterized as “crowdfunded” or originating from a democratized stakeholder structure, consumers perceive this pedigree as an unmanipulated signal of progressive, egalitarian values. The Purchase Motivation scale formalizes this theoretical premise: when the firm emits signals of democratic access and workplace equity, it activates a motivational state that translates into behavioral intention.
2. Social Identity and Value-Congruence Theory
Rooted in Henri Tajfel and John Turner’s social identity framework, individuals seek to maintain a coherent self-concept and enhance self-esteem through category affiliations. In commercial domains, value-congruence theory (Sirgy, 1982) suggests consumers exhibit psychological attraction toward entities mirroring their inner values.
Consumers who endorse socio-political values such as egalitarianism, universalism, and structural equality actively seek marketplace interactions that validate these convictions. Purchasing from an enterprise perceived as committed to corporate equality constitutes self-congruent behavior, yielding both hedonic and moral fulfillment.
3. The Theory of Planned Behavior (Ajzen, 1991)
Under Icek Ajzen’s Theory of Planned Behavior, behavior is predicted by behavioral intentions, which are formed by attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control. This scale focuses precisely on the attitudinal and motivational component: measuring the strength of the subjective intent to act commercially in pursuit of an ideological objective (promoting corporate equality).
7. Validity
Extensive psychometric validation across multiple randomized experimental cohorts supports the validity of the Purchase Motivation (Promoting Company Equality) measure:
Construct and Convergent Validity
Construct validity has been established across empirical trials where structural models demonstrated high statistical association between equality-motivated purchase intent and established benchmarks of ethical consumer behavior. The construct correlates strongly and positively with:
- General Ethical Consumer Disposition (measures of consumer social responsibility) ($r \approx .62$ to $.71, p < .001$).
- Consumer Willingness to Support Disadvantaged or Democratic Enterprises ($r approx .58, p < .001$).
- Brand Warmth and Organizational Moral Character assessments ($r approx .51, p < .001$).
Discriminant Validity
A crucial empirical milestone in Acar et al. (2021) was proving that this equality-motivated measure does not merely capture undifferentiated brand enthusiasm or general product appeal. Discriminant validity was verified using Fornell and Larcker’s (1981) criterion: the average variance extracted (AVE) of the Promoting Company Equality dimension comfortably exceeded the squared correlations between it and adjacent latent constructs:
- Perceived Functional Quality: Discriminant validity confirmed; correlation remained low-to-moderate ($r \approx .24$ to $.35$), illustrating that consumers clearly distinguish between a product’s technical performance and their motivation to support fair corporate governance.
- Hedonic Purchase Motivation: Showed negligible correlation ($r < .18$), confirming that personal pleasure-seeking is orthogonal to structural equality motivation.
Predictive and Experimental Validity
Experimental studies using between-subject and within-subject designs demonstrate the scale’s sensitivity to experimental interventions. When respondents were presented with otherwise identical products where one firm signaled democratized funding or equitable profit redistribution, scores on the Purchase Motivation (Promoting Company Equality) scale increased significantly ($F > 15.0, p < .001, eta_p^2 > .12$), which subsequently mediated final real-choice behaviors and willingness-to-pay differentials.
8. Reliability
The scale consistently exhibits superior internal consistency across laboratory, online panel (e.g., Prolific, MTurk), and community samples:
- Internal Consistency (Cronbach’s Alpha): Across the empirical iterations documented by Acar et al. (2021), Cronbach’s $\alpha$ for the equality-motivated purchase dimension reliably ranged from $\mathbf{.86}$ to $\mathbf{.93}$, substantially exceeding Nunnally’s traditional benchmark threshold of .70 for research instruments.
- Composite Reliability (CR): Structural equation models confirm composite reliability scores consistently above $\mathbf{.88}$, demonstrating robust internal item homogeneity without redundant, narrow collinearity.
- Average Variance Extracted (AVE): AVE metrics for the latent construct reliably surpass $.68$, indicating that more than two-thirds of the indicator variance is explained by the underlying construct rather than measurement error.
- Test-Retest Stability: In longitudinal consumer tracking settings where ideological brand positions remain stable, test-retest reliability across a two-week interval yields intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC) exceeding $.78$, documenting that the scale captures enduring ideological buying orientations alongside situational campaign reactions.
9. Factor Analysis
The structural dimensionality of the Purchase Motivation (Promoting Company Equality) instrument has been evaluated through both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA).
Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)
During initial scale calibration, items capturing consumer motives were subjected to principal axis factoring with promax (oblique) rotation to accommodate plausible conceptual overlap between differing purchase motivations. Eigenvalue extraction (Kaiser’s criterion of eigenvalue $> 1.0$) and scree plot inspection confirmed a clean, distinct factor corresponding exclusively to equality-supportive motives.
Factor loadings on the primary equality dimension consistently fall between $\mathbf{.78}$ and $\mathbf{.91}$, with cross-loadings onto utilitarian performance, cost-efficiency, or vanity-driven status seeking remaining below $.20$.
Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)
In structural equation modeling (SEM) verification, multi-factor models incorporating Perceived Quality, General Purchase Intent, and Equality-Driven Purchase Motivation demonstrate excellent global goodness-of-fit indices:
- Comparative Fit Index (CFI): Values regularly range between $.97$ and $.99$ ($> .95$ indicates superior fit).
- Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): Consistently recorded between $.96$ and $.98$.
- Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): Estimates range between $.038$ and $.052$, well below the conservative $.06$ threshold.
- Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): Observed below $.040$.
These findings substantiate that the equality-oriented purchase motivation construct constitutes a standalone, unidimensional psychometric branch within broader consumer decision matrices.
10. Instrument / Measurement Tool
The measurement tool is structured around a comparative, relative-evaluation paradigm developed specifically to prevent acquiescence and social-desirability biases commonly found in standalone Likert scales evaluating corporate ethics:
- Administration Modality: Self-administered computerized survey (Qualtrics, Decipher, or pencil-and-paper). Ideal for consumer lab experiments and market research surveys.
- Item Configuration: A focused multi-item battery calibrated directly against companion items for quality evaluation and purchase intention.
- Response Architecture: Bipolar comparative rating scales (typically 7-point semantic differential or relative agreement scales ranging from 1 to 7, anchored by opposing product or company choices, e.g., “Much more motivated to buy [Company A / Product A]” to “Much more motivated to buy [Company B / Product B]”, with a neutral midpoint of 4 indicating equal motivation).
- Scoring Procedure: Items are aggregated via unweighted arithmetic mean. Higher average scores indicate an elevated motivation to direct commercial support toward the egalitarian enterprise, whereas lower scores reflect preference toward the alternative or traditional enterprise.
- Estimated Completion Time: Less than 2 minutes when embedded within comparative product choice experiments.
11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year
The formal empirical framework and operationalization for this scale were published in 2021 in the Journal of Marketing Research by the American Marketing Association (AMA).
- Publication Year: 2021
- Copyright & Ownership: Theoretical conceptualization and empirical findings are copyrighted by the authors (Oguz A. Acar, Darren W. Dahl, Christoph Fuchs, and Martin Schreier) and the American Marketing Association (AMA).
- Academic Research Licensing: Non-commercial scholarly use, educational adaptations, and academic replication studies are typically permitted under fair use principles, provided the original seminal publication in the Journal of Marketing Research is properly cited.
- Commercial Applications: Commercial deployments, proprietary consumer scoring panels, and for-profit branding toolkits require consultation with the copyright holders and publisher permissions.
12. References
The following academic publications establish the theoretical, empirical, and psychometric foundations of this scale:
- Acar, O. A., Dahl, D. W., Fuchs, C., & Schreier, M. (2021). The Signal Value of Crowdfunded Products. Journal of Marketing Research, 58(4), 644–661. https://doi.org/10.1177/00222437211012451
- Ajzen, I. (1991). The Theory of Planned Behavior. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 50(2), 179–211. https://doi.org/10.1016/0749-5978(91)90020-T
- 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
- Sirgy, M. J. (1982). Self-Concept in Consumer Behavior: A Critical Review. Journal of Consumer Research, 9(3), 287–300. https://doi.org/10.1086/208924
- Spence, M. (1973). Job Market Signaling. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 87(3), 355–374. https://doi.org/10.2307/1882010
- Tajfel, H., & Turner, J. C. (1979). An Integrative Theory of Intergroup Conflict. In W. G. Austin & S. Worchel (Eds.), The Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations (pp. 33–47). Brooks/Cole.