Market Mavens' Attitudes Towards General Technology: Implications for Marketing Communications

Abstract Market mavens may become more important marketplace influencers, mainly due to their potential for helping other consumers deal with numerous product choices and to the growing acceptance of new technologies (e.g. the World Wide Web) as viable means for consumers to communicate with many other consumers. To date research has not provided a clear demographic profile of mavens and psychographical research concerning mavens has been lacking. This article examines attitudes towards general technology and several personality traits in order to determine whether they are related to mavenism. The findings indicate that affinity for technology is positively related to market mavens. Dispositional optimism, need for cognition and self‐efficacy are also positively associated with both mavenism and affinity for technology. Marketing communications implications and future research directions are discussed. Keywords: Market mavenspsychographicsattitudepersonalitytechnology Notes *p<0.0001, **p<0.05. Note: mavens and non‐mavens were classified according to their mean scores on the market mavenism scale. Mavens scored significantly higher (mean = 21.2 and p<0.0001) than non‐mavens (mean = 13.2). *p<0.0001, **p<0.001, ***p<0.003, ****p<0.01. aCloser to 1.00 is better. bLess is better: should be close to 0.05.