| Abstract: | A large and growing segment of global society is comprised of capable but unwilling readers. Despite the proliferation of aliteracy and extant research on illiterate consumers, the topic of consumer aliteracy is unexplored. To address the issue, an eight‐item unidimensional measure of the construct is developed and validated. This consumer aliteracy scale captures reading attitudes and behaviors across a variety of written marketing materials. Results indicate that consumer aliteracy is predictive of how consumers approach written versus visual marketing information and the amount of time devoted to these information formats in a choice setting. Understanding the phenomenon of consumer aliteracy is essential for researchers studying consumer responses to a wide variety of written marketing materials. In addition, consideration of consumer aliteracy may help research that employs written marketing messages as stimuli to better detect other processing effects. |
