Vicarious Innovativeness or Vicarious Learning: The Role of Existing Vicarious Innovativeness in New Product Purchase Intentions

This paper draws on the consumer innovativeness literature to examine the relationship between existing vicarious innovativeness scale and other forms of consumer innovativeness scales and its role on predicting new product purchase intentions in Australia and China. This study found that existing vicarious innovativeness scale is negatively associated with other forms of consumer innovativeness. Contrary to a significant body of academic research, this study demonstrates the ability of the existing vicarious innovativeness scale in predicting new product purchase intentions rather than new product adoption behaviour. The results have important implications by validating the existing vicarious innovativeness scale in a cross-cultural context. The results of this study question the existing vicarious innovativeness scale that it should only be considered as a measurement for vicarious learning. Instead, further research should seek additional sources of both innovators’ and imitators’ new product information acquisition in order to develop a proper scale to better measure vicarious innovativeness.