The Index of Consumer Sentiment toward Marketing

There have been a number of published measures of generalized consumer attitudes, perhaps the most familiar being the Index of Consumer Sentiment of the University of Michigan's Survey Research Center. What this article proposes is an “index of consumer sentiment toward marketing,” which is intended to be a validated, longitudinal, aggregate measure of national consumer sentiment toward marketing practice, to be reported at regular intervals to the marketing and consumer research communities. The article describes the measure and measurement procedure and provides validation evidence. Since this study also involved replication of prior research on this issue, information on the recent evolution of consumer sentiment toward marketing is presented.