Developing an emic scale to measure ad-evoked nostalgia in a collectivist emerging market, India

Abstract

Although there has been recent interest in the measurement of advertising-evoked nostalgia, the dimensionality and generalizability of the related scales are restricted to the national/cultural boundaries of Western nations. In the present study, we develop an emic scale to measure ad-evoked personal nostalgia in an important emerging economy, India, refining and purifying the scale with seven separate studies (with a combined sample size of 1823). The resulting scale contains five dimensions: past imagery, physiological reactions, positive emotions, negative emotions and collective nostalgia. In the present study, we follow rigorous scale development procedures, and we also go beyond by comparing the effectiveness of our emic scale with a previous scale developed in France (etic), and subsequently we test our measure in another (culturally-congruent) market – Bangladesh. Our study emphasizes the need for culture-specific measures (emic), and we present important theoretical and managerial insights.