The hedonic, utilitarian, and speculative factors of consumer imagination

Submission note: “This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy to the School of Marketing, Tourism and Hospitality, Faculty of Business, Economics and Law, La Trobe University, Bundoora.”.

Consumer imagination is a topic which has generated little interest among consumer behaviour researchers. This oversight has left unexplored the role of consumer imagination in consumer behaviour. This thesis addresses this gap by conceptualising the role of imagination in the consumer experience and by developing a scale of consumer imagination. It contributes to a better understanding of how consumers use their imagination and identifies three distinct facets of consumer imagination: hedonic imagination, which represents the degree of enjoyment a consumer receives from using their imagination; utilitarian imagination, which represents a consumer’s propensity to employ their imagination functionally and pragmatically; and speculative imagination, which represents a consumer’s propensity to employ their imagination in an exploratory manner. Imagination has been an elusive construct for consumer researchers, so developing a means to address it was the primary contribution of this thesis. A substantial review of the literature on imagination theory, imagination scaling and consumer imagination was conducted. The Churchill (1979) method was employed to achieve the desired results. An EFA was conducted on a pool of 51 items and the three theorized factors were confirmed. A total of three data sets were collected: one qualitative to develop an appropriate definition and a pool of items and two quantitative sets as a part of the scale development process. The third study undertaken was a CFA validation of the pool of items to retest the factors uncovered in the second study, testing the items using structural equation modelling, and confirmed. The scale was then tested against other constructs to establish the relevant and prescribed measures of scale validity. The scales used were (1) the Desire for Unique Objects (Lynn and Harris, 1997); (2) Consumer Novelty Seeking (Manning, Beardon and Madden, 1995); (3) Consumer Uniqueness (Price and Ridgeway, 1982); and (4) the Personality Orientation Model of Gountas (Gountas and Gountas, 2001). The results of all four scales were found to be broadly consistent with those of the imagination scale developed for this project.