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Abstract
Since the start of social media, there has been a rise in the ‘technomeritocracy’ or the importance of things being posted online for social gratification. While the online technomeritocracy seemingly drives in-person behavior, there is a need to better understand the divergent motivations behind this form of symbolic consumption and the sacrifices these motivations encourage for social media photos. With these needs in mind, we aimed to develop two scales to measure these influences. The development of the Conspicuous Consumption Posting Scale (CCPS) and the Travel Photo Sacrifice Scale (TPSS) follows the best practices of Churchill and Rossiter including multiple samples used to validate construct and predictive validity of each scale. Both scales can be used by management organizations to further improve their social media marketing strategies by understanding the motivations if their clientele and ensuring that expectations on price and quality are congruous with visitor expectations.