Continuous Improvement Products (CIPR)

Abstract

The Continuous Improvement Products (CIPR) scale is a specialized psychometric instrument developed by Norbert Schwarz and Hyeongmin (Christian) Cho (2020) to capture consumer perceptions regarding whether a product serves as an active vehicle for progressive, ongoing self-betterment. Rooted in consumer psychology, behavioral economics, and eudaimonic well-being, the CIPR scale addresses a critical omission in traditional product categorization paradigms, which historically bifurcated purchases merely into material versus experiential or utilitarian versus hedonic classifications. The CIPR instrument is a unidimensional, three-item self-report measure administered via a 7-point Likert response format. Across multiple empirical investigations, the scale has demonstrated robust psychometric properties, consistently exhibiting high internal consistency reliability (Cronbach’s alpha ranging between .86 and .93), clear unidimensional factor structure through exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, and sound convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity. Specifically, the scale reliably predicts sustained post-purchase consumer happiness, mitigation of hedonic adaptation, and elevated personal competence over extended consumption trajectories. This article provides an exhaustive examination of the CIPR scale, detailing its theoretical foundation, psychometric architecture, practical administration protocols, and overarching implications for psychological and market research.

Keywords

Continuous Improvement Products, CIPR, consumer happiness, self-improvement, hedonic adaptation, eudaimonic consumption, psychometrics, competence satisfaction, consumer behavior, product perception, self-actualization

Authors

The Continuous Improvement Products scale was conceptualized, operationalized, and validated by:

• Hyeongmin (Christian) Cho, Ph.D. — Associate Professor of Marketing at the SKK Graduate School of Business, Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul, Republic of Korea. Cho’s research specializes in consumer judgment, subjective well-being, transformative consumer research, and the psychological mechanisms underpinning product valuation and happiness.
• Norbert Schwarz, Ph.D. — Provost Professor of Psychology and Marketing at the Department of Psychology and the Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles, United States. Schwarz is an internationally recognized scholar in social cognition, survey methodology, cognitive feelings, and the metacognitive processes governing human judgment and decision-making.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the CIPR scale is to quantitatively measure the extent to which consumers perceive a given product, good, or service as an instrument designed to facilitate progressive, open-ended personal development over time. Historically, consumer psychologists and happiness researchers relied heavily on the material-versus-experiential dichotomy introduced by Van Boven and Gilovich (2003). While empirical evidence widely supported the experiential advantage—the finding that experiential purchases (e.g., travel, dining, concerts) yield more enduring happiness than material possessions (e.g., jewelry, designer clothing, electronics)—this framework failed to accommodate hybrid goods that fundamentally bridge the material and experiential divide through personal growth.

Products such as musical instruments, fitness equipment, foreign-language learning software, artistic tools, and athletic apparatus possess physical tangible properties while simultaneously functioning as dynamic catalysts for skill cultivation and self-transformation. Cho and Schwarz (2020) developed the CIPR scale to operationalize this distinct perceptual reality. The theoretical rationale rests on the premise that when an item is evaluated not as a static end-state possession, but as a scaffold for continuous personal mastery, it decouples consumption from typical hedonic decay. The instrument allows researchers to quantify consumer orientation toward self-betterment, investigate how product framing alters subjective evaluation, and assess how continuous improvement perceptions mitigate the psychological satiation that commonly characterizes consumer purchases.

Beyond academic consumer research, the CIPR scale provides substantial utility in applied settings. In commercial marketing, behavioral design, and product engineering, understanding whether end-users classify an offering as a continuous improvement product enables organizations to tailor onboarding interventions, communication campaigns, and user experiences that reinforce enduring competence satisfaction. In clinical, counseling, and positive psychology frameworks, the scale can be utilized to evaluate how individuals integrate physical artifacts into personal development plans, occupational therapy, and cognitive rehabilitation, illuminating the behavioral feedback loops between physical tool usage and perceived self-efficacy.

Psychological Construct

The psychological construct captured by the CIPR scale is defined as perceived continuous product improvement affordance: a consumer’s cognitive appraisal that an acquired good possesses structural or functional characteristics that enable ongoing, iterative enhancements in user capability, competence, or self-actualization. Unlike static consumer durables whose utility functions remain constant or depreciate immediately post-acquisition, a continuous improvement product is cognitively represented as an evolving partner in human development.

The construct is unidimensional but comprises three interwoven conceptual facets:

• Progressive Competence Facilitation: The degree to which the product provides an ongoing sequence of challenge-and-mastery opportunities. The user perceives that using the product today lays the foundational capacity to execute more sophisticated, refined, or complex actions tomorrow. For example, a runner using a progressive tracking ecosystem experiences their GPS watch not simply as a chronometer, but as an active agent in their evolving physiological endurance.
• Teleological Development Orientation: The extent to which the core purpose or intended design of the product is oriented toward the user’s self-evolution. Rather than resolving a singular, discrete problem (such as a can opener opening a can, or an umbrella shielding against rain), the continuous improvement product is viewed as structurally dedicated to fostering a “better version of the self.”
• Temporal Open-Endedness: The perceived absence of an imminent ceiling regarding personal gains. Continuous improvement products imply a dynamic consumption horizon wherein the consumer never fully exhausts the self-developmental potential of the interaction, thereby sustaining user engagement across weeks, months, or years.

Importantly, Cho and Schwarz emphasized that continuous improvement is primarily a perceptual construct rather than an objective taxonomy of hardware. While certain physical items (e.g., a digital piano or rock climbing shoes) inherently possess high baseline affordances for continuous improvement, even mundane goods can be reframed psychologically. Conversely, highly sophisticated technologies may be perceived as static if the user utilizes them solely for passive diversion. The CIPR scale specifically isolates this cognitive appraisal, separating the psychological perception of developmental affordance from the objective material complexity of the object.

Theoretical Framework

The CIPR scale is built upon an integration of several major psychological paradigms, including Self-Determination Theory, Mindset Theory, and the psychology of hedonic adaptation.

Self-Determination Theory and Basic Psychological Needs

Within Self-Determination Theory (Ryan & Deci, 2000), personal psychological flourishing is sustained through the fulfillment of three innate psychological needs: autonomy, relatedness, and competence. Continuous improvement products directly target the need for competence—the psychological experience of mastery, effectiveness, and expanding capability in negotiating one’s environment. While standard consumer acquisitions frequently induce a transient spike in positive affect that quickly decays, products perceived as continuous improvement instruments continually generate competence-satisfying feedback loops. Each interaction reveals incremental progress, directly sustaining intrinsic motivation and self-efficacy.

Implicit Theories of Intelligence and Personal Growth

The conceptual logic of CIPR intersects profoundly with Carol Dweck’s (2006) model of implicit theories of human attributes. Individuals operating within an incremental theory (a “growth mindset”) perceive abilities as malleable qualities capable of cultivated expansion through effort and strategic tool utilization. The CIPR scale reflects the material operationalization of this growth orientation: it captures the consumer’s perception that physical possessions can act as tangible conduits for expanding cognitive, physical, or creative malleability. Products scoring high on CIPR align directly with the human desire for iterative self-transcendence.

Mitigation of Hedonic Adaptation

A foundational tenet of subjective well-being research is the hedonic treadmill hypothesis (Brickman & Campbell, 1971; Lyubomirsky et al., 2005), which posits that humans rapidly adapt to changes in their objective circumstances, returning to a baseline set-point of emotional affect. Material possessions are notoriously susceptible to hedonic adaptation because their physical properties remain static while cognitive familiarity breeds habituation. Experiential purchases resist adaptation because they are stored as evolving autobiographical memories. Cho and Schwarz (2020) demonstrated that continuous improvement products bypass hedonic adaptation because the experience of using the material possession alters systematically over time. As the user’s mastery expands, the nature of the interaction shifts, producing non-redundant, novel psychological feedback that continuously generates subjective happiness.

Validity

The psychometric validity of the CIPR scale has been extensively corroborated across diverse experimental paradigms, field studies, and cross-sectional replications reported by Cho and Schwarz (2020) and subsequent researchers.

Construct and Convergent Validity

Construct validity was established by evaluating the degree to which items loaded robustly onto their target latent factor and correlated with conceptually contiguous psychological constructs. Confirmatory factor analyses demonstrated that all three items consistently exhibited high standardized factor loadings exceeding .80, indicating that the scale accurately taps the intended cognitive domain. Convergent validity is evidenced by significant positive correlations with self-directed growth strivings, perceived competence satisfaction, task engagement, and personal investment metrics ($r$-values typically ranging from .45 to .68, $p < .001$).

Discriminant Validity

Crucially, the scale exhibits rigorous discriminant validity against established consumption categorization constructs. Cho and Schwarz demonstrated that CIPR does not simply track:

• General Utilitarian Value: Utilitarian products fulfill functional needs efficiently, but do not necessarily foster user betterment (e.g., laundry detergent or a microwave). Factor loadings and average variance extracted (AVE) metrics demonstrate that CIPR operates orthogonally to general utilitarian utility.
• Hedonic / Luxury Orientation: Hedonic goods generate sensory gratification and pleasure without cultivating personal agency or progressive skill development. The CIPR scale displays weak or non-significant correlations with pure hedonic indulgence indexes ($r < .15$).
• The Material vs. Experiential Binary: Discriminant tests demonstrate that CIPR accounts for variance in longitudinal consumer satisfaction that is completely uncaptured by traditional categorical sorting into material versus experiential purchases.

Predictive and Nomological Validity

Predictive validity has been demonstrated through multi-wave experimental designs. In longitudinal tracking of consumer purchases, products rated high on the CIPR scale predicted sustained happiness weeks and months after purchase, whereas ratings for products low on the CIPR scale exhibited classic patterns of rapid hedonic decay. Furthermore, when identical products (e.g., an electronic keyboard or athletic shoes) were framed using either continuous improvement cues or static utility cues, manipulated CIPR scores successfully mediated the treatment effect on consumer well-being, willingness to repurchase, and intrinsic product valuation.

Reliability

The reliability profile of the CIPR scale has been evaluated using classical test theory metrics across both undergraduate research panels and heterogeneous adult samples (e.g., Amazon Mechanical Turk, Prolific Academic).

Internal Consistency

Across the five empirical studies reported in the seminal paper by Cho and Schwarz (2020), the CIPR scale demonstrated outstanding internal consistency reliability:

• Study 1 (Retrospective Purchase Evaluation): Cronbach’s $\alpha = .89$, demonstrating excellent internal consistency across real-world recalled purchases.
• Study 2 (Product Framing Experiments): Cronbach’s $\alpha = .91$, confirming that experimental manipulation of improvement affordances maintained high inter-item covariance.
• Study 3 (Longitudinal Consumer Happiness): Cronbach’s $\alpha = .88$, with item-total correlations across the three items ranging from .74 to .83.
• Study 4 & 5 (Mediation and Replication Analyses): Cronbach’s $\alpha = .92$ and $.90$ respectively, establishing broad stability across diverse product categories including sports gear, software, educational products, and household tools.

Composite Reliability (CR) values across all tested cohorts uniformly exceed the recommended .80 psychometric threshold, consistently hovering between .89 and .93. The Average Variance Extracted (AVE) routinely surpasses .70, well above the .50 benchmark advocated by Fornell and Larcker (1981), affirming that measurement error variance is minimized.

Factor Analysis

The dimensionality of the CIPR scale was thoroughly investigated through exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) protocols during its initial validation.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

Initial exploratory factor analyses utilizing principal axis factoring and maximum likelihood estimation with both orthogonal (Varimax) and oblique (Promax) rotations consistently yielded a unidimensional factor structure. In all baseline administrations:

• A single dominant factor emerged with an eigenvalue significantly greater than Kaiser’s criterion of 1.0 (typically $lambda > 2.30$).
• The primary factor accounted for more than 75% to 83% of the total item variance.
• Scree plot examinations demonstrated an unmistakable “elbow” immediately following the first factor, confirming the absence of secondary or residual sub-dimensions.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Subsequent confirmatory factor analytic models specified a strictly unidimensional latent variable with the three observed indicators. Because a standard three-indicator single-factor model is just-identified ($df = 0$), evaluation of model fit was performed within larger measurement models incorporating related constructs (e.g., hedonic value, utilitarian value, material purchase identification, and perceived competence). Across multi-factor measurement structures, the CIPR items demonstrated pristine fit indices:

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): Values routinely reached $ge .98$, indicative of exceptional comparative fit.
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): Values consistently remained $ge .97$.
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): Estimates remained below .05 (90% CI [.000, .072]), demonstrating negligible approximation error.
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): Observed values were uniformly below .03, indicating high structural congruence between observed and implied covariance matrices.
• Standardized Factor Loadings: Item loadings onto the continuous improvement latent factor consistently ranged between $lambda = .82$ and $lambda = .94$, confirming that each individual indicator provides a powerful and reliable manifestation of the overarching construct.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The Continuous Improvement Products scale is designed for efficient, low-burden administration in laboratory, online, and field environments. Below are the administrative and structural specifications of the instrument:

• Instrument Designation: Continuous Improvement Products Scale (CIPR)
• Construct Measured: Consumer perception of a product as an active tool/instrument for continuous, progressive self-improvement.
• Administration Format: Self-report questionnaire, available via pen-and-paper or digital survey engines (e.g., Qualtrics, SurveyMonkey).
• Target Respondent: Adult consumers (general population, student samples, or targeted market segments) evaluating either a recently acquired product, an envisioned purchase, or an experimentally framed product description.
• Total Item Count: 3 items
• Dimensionality: Unidimensional (single composite score)
• Response Scale: 7-point Likert scale:
  • 1 = Strongly Disagree
  • 2 = Disagree
  • 3 = Somewhat Disagree
  • 4 = Neither Agree nor Disagree
  • 5 = Somewhat Agree
  • 6 = Agree
  • 7 = Strongly Agree
• Scoring Protocol:
  • There are no reverse-coded items in the CIPR scale; all three items are keyed in the positive theoretical direction.
  • Individual respondent scores are calculated by averaging the numerical responses across all 3 items: $\text{CIPR Score} = \frac{\text{Item 1} + \text{Item 2} + \text{Item 3}}{3}$.
  • Higher mean scores (approaching 7.0) indicate a robust appraisal of the product as a vehicle for continuous self-betterment, whereas lower scores (approaching 1.0) reflect a perception of the product as static, non-developmental, or purely consumptive.
• Completion Time: Under 1 minute, making it ideal for inclusion in omnibus surveys and longitudinal experimental batteries without inducing respondent fatigue.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Continuous Improvement Products scale was originally developed and published in 2020 in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science by authors Hyeongmin Cho and Norbert Schwarz.

• Publication Year: 2020
• Access and Usage Rights: The scale was published within an academic peer-reviewed journal. The scale is freely accessible for non-commercial academic research, empirical scholarly inquiry, and non-profit educational purposes under academic fair-use conventions, provided proper attribution and citation are accorded to Cho and Schwarz (2020).
• Commercial Applications: Commercial entities, market research agencies, or proprietary commercial assessment platforms intending to deploy the scale for commercial consulting, commercial marketing metrics, or profit-generating evaluation platforms should consult standard copyright policies governed by the publisher (Springer Nature / Academy of Marketing Science) or contact the lead authors directly to seek explicit permissions.
• Associated Fees: There is no fee required for scholarly and academic researchers utilizing the measure in scientific research.

References

• Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. W. H. Freeman and Company.
• Brickman, P., & Campbell, D. T. (1971). Hedonic relativism and planning the good society. In M. H. Appley (Ed.), Adaptation-level theory: A symposium (pp. 287–302). Academic Press.
• Cho, H., & Schwarz, N. (2020). I want a better version of me: Continuous improvement products and happiness. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 48(5), 899–916. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-020-00727-4
• Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The new psychology of success. Random House.
• Fornell, C., & Larcker, D. F. (1981). Evaluating structural equation models with unobservable variables and measurement error. Journal of Marketing Research, 18(1), 39–50. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224378101800104
• Lyubomirsky, S., Sheldon, K. M., & Schkade, D. (2005). Pursuing happiness: The architecture of sustainable change. Review of General Psychology, 9(2), 111–131. https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.9.2.111
• Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68–78. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.55.1.68
• Ryff, C. D. (1989). Happiness is everything, or is it? Explorations on the meaning of psychological well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57(6), 1069–1081. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.57.6.1069
• Van Boven, L., & Gilovich, T. (2003). To do or to have? That is the question. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(6), 1193–1202. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.85.6.1193
• Waterman, A. S. (1993). Two conceptions of happiness: Contrasts of personal expressiveness (eudaimonia) and hedonic enjoyment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 64(4), 678–691. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.64.4.678

Items of the Scale