The Development of a Scale for the Assessment of Consumer Pleasure Evoked by Product Appearance

The purpose of this study was to develop a scale for the assessment of a consumer's pleasurable response to product appearance, since a consumer pleasure evoked by a product became a very important characteristic to promote a product sale in the current market. Based on a pretest, three items were eliminated from a pool of 20 items, and a refined 17-items scale was constructed. Factor analysis resulted in two factors: gratification and pleasure, supporting Seligman's (2002) happiness theory, Jordan's (2000) pleasure theory, and Norman's (2004) three levels of emotions. Predictive validation and cross validation were tested with adequate results. A parallel validity study was also carried out based on a Spearman correlation, with an acceptable coefficient. In addition, the internal consistency of the scale was confirmed with Cronbach's α between. 85 to. 95 for each factor over three stimuli. Retest with a three-week interval indicated acceptable reliability (.70 to .78). The result suggested that this scale has adequate validity and reliability for the measurement of pleasure evoked by product appearance. Finally, some suggestions were made for developing pleasurable products and further studies.