Advances on the Measure of Judgment and Meaning of the Product for Brazil

Abstract

The purpose of this paper was the development a measure of judgment and meaning of the product valid for Brazilian consumers. It consisted in a two-stage study including both qualitative and quantitative approaches. In the qualitative stage, focus groups with 16 Brazilian participants allowed the generation of 40 items for a new scale of judgment and meaning of the product. After semantic validation and expert analysis, the found items composed a questionnaire administered to 684 participants in a paper-and-pencil survey. Results suggest that the items performed considerably better when compared to the previous version, indicating their potential of usage not only in Brazil, but also in other countries. The final measure remained with 20 items that were distributed in four factors, as pointed by the literature review. Two factors are related to judgment types (piecemeal and affective), whilst the other two are related to meaning types (utilitarian and symbolic). Additional results, as expected, showed that product's utilitarian meaning is positively correlated to a piecemeal judgment, whereas symbolic meaning is positively related to affective judgment. Managerial implications for marketing, and future research directions are proposed.