Emotional Response Beyond PAD: the Digital Retail Emotions Scale (DRES) for m-commerce apps

The PAD Scale (Donovan & Rossiter 1982) has become one of the core elements of academic understanding of emotional reactions (Sirohi et al. 1998; Baker et al. 2002), yet it is not a specific enough scale for investigating m-commerce experience, due to the interactive nature of this type of technology. An m-commerce specific scale is thus required. Utilising ‘Word Association Projection Technique’ (Malhotra 2004), 15 female participants ages 18-30 were prompted through Photo Elicitation to 21 image-choice sets, consisting of four images relating to the m-commerce design stimuli (fashion retail apps). Participants provided two emotional adjectives towards each image. Qualitative analysis was performed on the data to produce the hierarchical DRES scale. 2337 emotional adjectives captured through qualitative consumer insight led to the development of the DRES scale that allows for the appropriate capture and exploration of consumer experience in m-commerce. The uni-polar DRES scale allows for an academic and theoretical foundation to m-commerce shopping experience to be conducted, understanding the deeper qualia of the consumer than possible under other, non m-commerce focused and applicable scales. This shall allow for the collecting and understanding of more accurate and current information from m-commerce consumers than achievable under the over 40 year old PAD scale. This is the first emotional response scale specifically developed to explore and explain the experience of the m-commerce retail platform.