Lead-users in marketing: Questions and new psychometric contributions

Abstract

Lead-users play a significant role in new product development; consequently it is a major challenge for companies that want to innovate to identify them. Although several lead-user scales exist in the literature, none is completely efficient. A new measure therefore deserves to be developed. Its validity is proved on many product categories, through three different studies. The first is devoted to developing the lead-user’s scale. The second sets up the scale’s construct validity and norms the scale on a representative sample of the French population for three food products. We point out that lead-user and opinion-leader are two different concepts, although some people can combine the two statuses and thus be both lead-user and opinion-leader. Lead-user refers to a specific product category. Based on a new representative sample, the third study confirms the scale’s nomological validity for a new product category: lead-user is positively related to co-creation competencies and to engagement in video games co-creation.