Measuring Salesperson Orientation of Consumers

Assistant Professor of Business Management

Marriott School of Management

Brigham Young University

681 TNRB

Provo, UT 84602

(801) 422-2266

jeff_larson@byu.edu

Assistant Professor of Business Management

Marriott School of Management

Brigham Young University

663 TNRB

Provo, UT 84602

(801) 422-3113

sterling_bone@byu.edu

Research on customer-salesperson relationships and sales performance has been plentiful (Churchill et al. 1985; Franke and Park 2006). This research can be divided into two major categories: 1) research that focuses on the properties of specific customer-salesperson relationships and the effects of those properties, and 2) research on enduring salesperson characteristics and their consequents.

More recently, researchers have begun to focus on the role of the consumer in the salesperson-customer interaction (Kirmani and Campbell 2004). Much of this study has grown from the acknowledgement of the Persuasion Knowledge Model of consumer behavior (Friestad and Wright 1994). This recent consumer-focused literature parallels the first category of the salesperson-focused stream of literature—an assessment of situation-specific consumer behavior in the sales process. We develop the Salesperson Orientation of Consumers (SOC) Scale to aid researchers and practitioners alike in understanding the many enduring consumer characteristics that affect the consumer-salesperson interaction.

We define the Salesperson Orientation of Consumers (SOC) as the enduring disposition of a consumer to engage in particular salesperson-related thoughts and behaviors across a variety of marketplace encounters with salespeople. Previous research on consumer behavior regarding salespeople has focused on how this behavior changes as a result of the properties of a particular interaction. By developing the SOC scale, we hope to identify and measure the salesperson-related behaviors that are determined more by consumer traits than the interaction.

To develop the Salesperson Orientation of Consumers (SOC) scale, we followed the procedures for creating and validating scales developed by Churchill (1979). First, an initial set of items were drafted. The original list of potential scale items came from several sources. A literature review on consumer-salesperson interaction turned up a 13-item scale from Goff, Bellenger and Stojack (1994) which measured consumers’ orientation toward automobile salespeople. We adapted their scale items to address general salesperson orientation, rather than car-salesperson-specific orientation.

A second source of preliminary scale items came from a two-stage brainstorming process. In the first stage, we hypothesized various factors that consumers could use to describe their feelings and orientations toward salespeople, including factors from the literature and some of our own hypothesis. After brainstorming these factors with ourselves and by informal consultation with various colleagues, we generated several items to measure each of these factors. We then removed redundant measures, which resulted in a pool of 35 items.
Scale Purification: Study 1

The 35-item scale was administered to three different samples. The data from all three studies were subjected to separate exploratory factor analyses with a varimax rotation. In all three studies, the results suggested a four-factor structure with similar loadings across the 35 items. Individual scale items that either 1) did not load strongly on any of the four dimensions or 2) did not load consistently across all three studies were dropped. This left the 18 items below. Items 1-5, 6-10, 11-15, and 16-18 loaded on factors 1, 2, 3, and 4, respectively.

2. I value the opinion of salespeople.

3. I feel more comfortable buying something when a salesperson has recommended it to me.

4. I want salespeople to help me make decisions.

5. I trust the information I get from salespeople.

6. I feel some obligation to please salespeople.

7. I sometimes wonder if a salesperson thinks better of me as a result of my buying something.

8. I sometimes wonder if a salesperson thinks ill of me when I don’t purchase anything.

9. I am sometimes afraid that a salesperson will think I’m cheap if I don’t buy something.

10. When I decline to buy something, I feel bad for the salesperson.

11. I avoid stores with a lot of salespeople.

12. When shopping, I would rather make the decision on my own before talking to any salespeople.

13. I wish salesclerks only answered questions instead of trying to convince you to buy something.

14. I feel more comfortable entering a store where I know salespeople will not approach me.

15. I wish I could forever avoid having to talk to a salesperson.

16. I am a person who is easily convinced by salespeople.

17. I could be talked into a purchase by a persuasive salesperson.

18. For reasons I don’t fully understand, pushy salespeople are often successful in getting a sale from me.

To test the new 18-item scale, 532 undergraduates completed the scale in exchange for extra credit in a marketing course. The data were then submitted to the same factor analysis with varimax rotation as previously performed to check that the factor loadings concurred with the data collected from the 35-item scale. The resulting factor structure aligned precisely with the one predicted. The data were also subjected to a confirmatory factor analysis in Lisrel 8.8, which confirmed the four-factor structure on all measures.

In study 4, participants responded to a number of vignettes about marketplace behavior relating to salespeople. Due to space limitations, we cannot present the results here, but the full working paper is available from the authors.

Churchill, Gilbert A. (1979), “A Paradigm for Developing Better Measures of Marketing Constructs,” Journal of Marketing Research, 16, 64-73.

Churchill, Gilbert A. Jr., Neil M. Ford, Steven M. Hartley and Orville C. Walker Jr. (1985), “The Determinants of Salesperson Performance: A Meta-Analysis,” Journal of Marketing Research, 22(2), 103-118.

Franke, George R. and Jeong-Eun Park (2006), “Salesperson Adaptive Selling Behavior and Customer Orientation,” Journal of Marketing Research, 43(4), 693-702.

Friestad, Marian and Peter Wright (1994), “Persuasion Knowledge Model: How People Cope with Persuasion Attempts,” Journal of Consumer Research, 21(1), 1-31.

Goff, Brent G., Danny N. Bellenger and Carrie Stojack (1994), “Cues to Consumer Susceptibility to Salesperson Influence: Implications for Adaptive Retail Selling,” Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management, 2, 25-39.

Kirmani, Amna and Margaret C. Campbell (2004), “Goal Seeker and Persuasion Sentry: How Consumer Targets Respond to Interpersonal Marketing Persuasion,” Journal of Consumer Research, 31(3), 573-582.

Lennox, Richard D., and Raymond N. Wolfe (1984), “Revision of the Self-Monitoring Scale,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 46, 1349-1364.