The concept of generativity—that is, adults' preoccupation for the well-being of the next generations—has been the subject of numerous studies in social psychology since the 1950's. In parallel, many companies are positioning their products and services as generative, a reality that has not been extensively studied from an academic perspective in marketing. To remedy this shortcoming, we propose the formal introduction of the concept of generativity in the marketing literature, as well as the development of a measurement scale entirely dedicated to consumer generativity. We also analyze the effects of a generative positioning on consumer behaviour. The results of our first study showed that product generative positioning had positive and significant effects on attitudes toward the ad and the products, as well as purchase intentions. Those effects were even more important when targeted consumers were themselves highly generative. Moreover, the construction of the consumer generativity scale revealed two dimensions for the construct: communal and agentic. The analysis of the predictive validity of the consumer generativity scale has again shown the importance of targeting highly generative people in the case of products positioned as generative. However, the analysis of the generative type of positioning, the locus of control and family income as moderators did not reveal statistically significant relationships. Our research have nevertheless shown that married consumers were more generative than singles, and only people with a confortable family income or raising children had a high index of communal generativity. In addtion, fathers were more generative than mothers with regards to the agentic dimension of generativity. These results also stress the importance of identifying the type of generativity (communal or agentic) demonstrated by said consumers.
