Attitude Toward the Company’s Communications Scale (ATCC)

1. Abstract

The Attitude Toward the Company’s Communications Scale (ATCC) is a concise, psychometrically validated three-item, seven-point Likert-type scale designed to evaluate a consumer’s overarching evaluative perception of the quality, reach, visibility, informativeness, and believability of communications disseminated by a commercial organization. Originally adapted by Bernhard Swoboda, Bettina Berg, and Hanna Schramm-Klein (2013) within the conceptual framework of corporate reputation and store equity dynamics, the instrument traces its operational roots back to the classic retail store image semantic anchors established by Kelly and Stephenson (1967). The ATCC captures three vital cognitive-affective dimensions of corporate communication: informational utility (whether organizational communications clearly articulate relevant corporate and operational matters), pervasive market exposure (whether communications are adequately visible and conspicuous through sustained market presence), and communicative credibility (whether the claims and promotional messages conveyed are trustworthy, plausible, and believable).

Validated on an extensive empirical sample of 5,600 consumers surveyed across 30 distinct metropolitan retail markets in Germany, the ATCC exhibits robust psychometric performance. Confirmatory factor analyses establish that the unidimensional construct demonstrates excellent indicator loadings (λ ≥ 0.70), superior internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha α > 0.80; composite reliability > 0.82), and marked average variance extracted (AVE > 0.60), surpassing standard psychometric thresholds. Furthermore, within structural equation modeling paradigms, the scale demonstrates rigorous convergent, discriminant, and criterion-related predictive validity, exhibiting significant structural pathways toward corporate reputation, brand equity, customer trust, and reciprocal store patronage intentions. Although originally tested in large-scale grocery and department store retailing contexts, the semantic structure of the ATCC is intentionally parsimonious and broadly phrased, rendering it exceptionally versatile for public relations, integrated marketing communications, corporate social responsibility (CSR) assessment, and brand communication research across diverse business-to-consumer (B2C) and multi-channel service environments.

2. Keywords

Attitude Toward the Company’s Communications Scale, ATCC, corporate communication, corporate reputation, store equity, advertising credibility, marketing communications, message informativeness, message visibility, consumer perception, retail branding, structural equation modeling

3. Authors

The scale was formalized and validated by an esteemed team of retail marketing and psychometrics scholars:

• Bernhard Swoboda, Ph.D. — Professor of Marketing and Retailing, Chair for Marketing and Retailing, University of Trier, Universitätsring 15, 54286 Trier, Germany. Specialized in retail management, international marketing, and corporate branding.
• Bettina Berg, Ph.D. — Researcher and Lecturer, Chair for Marketing and Retailing, University of Trier, Trier, Germany. Expert in multi-channel retailing, retail branding, and consumer behavior analysis.
• Hanna Schramm-Klein, Ph.D. — Full Professor of Marketing, Chair of Marketing and Retailing, University of Siegen, Kohlbettstr. 15, 57072 Siegen, Germany. Noted for empirical research on multi-channel commerce, supply chain relationships, and retail equity.

Historical foundational items were adapted from pioneering retail image research conducted by Robert F. Kelly and Ronald F. Stephenson (1967).

4. Purpose

The central purpose of the Attitude Toward the Company’s Communications Scale (ATCC) is to provide researchers, brand managers, and organizational behavioral scientists with a standardized, reliable, and parsimonious diagnostic instrument to quantify consumer perceptions regarding external organizational communications. Modern corporations operate in hyper-saturated media ecosystems where consumer attention is fragmented, skeptical, and difficult to retain. Organizations allocate massive financial capital toward institutional advertising, retail circulars, corporate social responsibility disclosures, public relations campaigns, and omnichannel digital messages. However, high marketing expenditure does not inherently translate into favorable consumer evaluations. The ATCC bridges this evaluative gap by measuring not merely gross brand recall or message recognition, but the qualitative appraisal of whether corporate communications are informative, pervasive, and authentic.

In academic marketing and consumer psychology research, the ATCC serves as an indispensable exogenous or mediating variable within structural equation models (SEM). Specifically, it enables researchers to investigate the reciprocal relationships between communicative touchpoints, corporate reputation (the macro-level cognitive evaluation of a firm’s competence, responsibility, and reliability), and localized store or product brand equity. In retail contexts, where corporate branding and store-level interactions continually intersect, the scale decouples the consumer’s perception of operational store elements (e.g., pricing, assortment, service) from institutional communicative messaging, isolating how advertising and corporate announcements feed directly into the firm’s overarching reputational capital.

In applied corporate diagnostics, the ATCC operates as an agile, low-burden benchmarking metric. Because lengthier psychometric batteries induce respondent fatigue and inflate non-response biases, survey researchers often struggle to measure advertising reception alongside broad arrays of service quality, pricing, and lifestyle variables. The three-item architecture of the ATCC addresses this practical trade-off, providing high psychometric stability while consuming minimal survey real estate. Organizations utilize the ATCC to track pre- and post-campaign communication effectiveness, conduct competitor benchmarking across geographical metropolitan clusters, assess crisis communication recovery, and evaluate whether corporate rebranding messages effectively penetrate target demographic segments with sustained credibility.

5. Psychological Construct

The construct captured by the ATCC represents a consumer’s holistic evaluative disposition toward an enterprise’s collective communicative outputs. Rather than evaluating a single advertisement, slogan, or localized promotional flyer, the scale captures an aggregated, memory-based attitude formed through continuous longitudinal exposure to the firm’s integrated marketing communications (IMC). Drawing on Eagly and Chaiken’s (1993) tripartite model of attitudes, the ATCC primarily measures cognitive and affective evaluations across three mutually reinforcing sub-dimensions:

1. Informational Utility (Informativeness)

This dimension assesses the degree to which an organization’s communications provide meaningful, diagnostic, and actionable information regarding its offerings, values, operational policies, and corporate behavior. Drawing from consumer information-processing theory, informativeness reflects whether the communication successfully reduces buyer uncertainty and aids rational decision-making. If communications are perceived purely as hyper-promotional fluff devoid of real-world value, scores on this dimension plumet. Conversely, high informativeness indicates that consumers perceive the firm’s messaging as substantive, revealing relevant insights about corporate policies, product origins, price points, and ethical practices.

2. Market Visibility (Reach and Pervasiveness)

This operational dimension captures the perceptual salience and frequency of the organization’s media presence within the consumer’s sensory environment. Grounded in the mere-exposure effect (Zajonc, 1968) and availability heuristics (Tversky & Kahneman, 1973), corporate messages must cross a perceptual threshold of physical and digital exposure before cognitive attitudes can solidify. Consumers assess whether the company maintains a recognizable, consistent, and active voice across relevant media channels (e.g., print circulars, outdoor displays, television, digital networks). Visibility does not equate to perceived intrusion or spam; rather, it reflects a strong, active market footprint that signals organizational vitality and operational prominence.

3. Communicative Credibility (Believability and Authenticity)

Communicative credibility gauges the perceived honesty, plausibility, and integrity embedded in the firm’s promotional assertions. Informed by source credibility literature (Hovland & Weiss, 1951), this dimension determines whether receivers accept marketing messages as truthful representations or reject them as misleading puffery. If a company boasts prominent visibility and dense information flows but lacks credibility, the overall communication effort collapses into cynicism and reactance. Believability acts as the essential psychological gatekeeper: high believability converts visible and informative claims into authentic brand trust, corporate legitimacy, and relational goodwill.

6. Theoretical Framework

The Attitude Toward the Company’s Communications Scale is grounded in several foundational paradigms within social psychology, psycholinguistics, and consumer behavior:

Information Processing and Elaboration Likelihood Model

The scale integrates Petty and Cacioppo’s (1986) Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM). The ELM posits that persuasion occurs via two distinct cognitive pathways: the central route (requiring systematic scrutiny of message arguments) and the peripheral route (relying on heuristic cues such as source prominence and sheer repetition). The ATCC captures both pathways simultaneously: informativeness and believability engage the central route by measuring the rational cogency and diagnostic validity of message content, while visibility leverages peripheral heuristics, capitalizing on familiarity, perceptual fluency, and corporate size cues to foster favorable attitudinal impressions.

Source Credibility and Attribution Theory

Central to the scale’s believability dimension is Attribution Theory (Heider, 1958; Kelley, 1973). When processing corporate claims, consumers continually construct causal attributions: is the firm communicating transparently to inform stakeholders, or are claims strategically fabricated solely to manipulate market behavior? Following the persuasion knowledge model (Friestad & Wright, 1994), consumers activate defensive coping mechanisms when corporate communications appear disingenuous. The ATCC quantifies the ultimate output of this cognitive calculation: an authentic, highly credible rating indicates that consumers attribute communicative intent to genuine corporate accountability and competence rather than cynical opportunism.

Corporate Reputation and Signaling Theory

In retail and corporate marketing theory, asymmetric information separates companies from everyday consumers. Under Signaling Theory (Spence, 1973), corporate communications function as strategic market signals designed to signal underlying, unobservable corporate attributes such as product quality, ethical integrity, and financial strength. Swoboda, Berg, and Schramm-Klein (2013) demonstrated that communications do not exist in an analytical vacuum; rather, positive attitudes toward corporate communications act as vital antecedents that reinforce corporate reputation. Reciprocally, an already pristine corporate reputation elevates consumer receptivity to subsequent communications, establishing a virtuous attitudinal feedback loop.

7. Validity

The psychometric validity of the ATCC was extensively evaluated and confirmed by Swoboda, Berg, and Schramm-Klein (2013) utilizing rigorous structural equation modeling methodologies across a stratified multi-market dataset:

Sample Characteristics and Data Collection

The scale was tested through an extensive empirical field study comprising N = 5,600 consumers distributed across 30 defined retail trading zones in German metropolitan areas. The sample was drawn using multi-stage quota sampling reflecting representative demographic breakdowns across age, gender, education, and household income, minimizing single-region cultural biases and demographic idiosyncrasies.

Construct and Convergent Validity

Convergent validity evaluates the extent to which the three survey items correlate as indicators of the underlying communicative attitude construct. As reported in the foundational empirical testing:

• Standardized factor loadings (λ) for all three items exceeded the recommended threshold of 0.70, ranging from 0.72 to 0.84, confirming that each indicator accounts for substantial shared variance with the latent factor.
• The Average Variance Extracted (AVE) comfortably exceeded the standard 0.50 benchmark, demonstrating that over 60% of indicator variance is directly attributable to the latent communication attitude construct rather than random measurement error.
• Statistical significance for all individual item loadings was established at p < 0.001, providing robust mathematical proof of convergent validity.

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity was established through the rigorous Fornell-Larcker criterion and cross-loading assessments. The square root of the AVE for the ATCC latent variable was significantly higher than its highest inter-construct correlations with neighboring structural constructs, including:

• Overall Corporate Reputation (and its subcomponents: Corporate Competence, Responsibility, and Attractiveness)
• Store Equity (Retailer Awareness, Perceived Quality, Store Loyalty, Store Associations)
• Perceptions of Store Merchandise and Pricing Structure

These empirical boundaries prove that consumer evaluations of corporate communication are conceptually and empirically distinct from product satisfaction, store-level pricing perceptions, and general institutional goodwill.

Predictive and Nomological Validity

The nomological validity of the ATCC was established by demonstrating theoretical coherence within comprehensive structural equation path models. When modeled as an antecedent to corporate reputation and store equity:

• The ATCC exhibited direct, positive, and statistically significant path coefficients (β ranging from 0.28 to 0.42, p < 0.001) predicting corporate reputation dimensions.
• Corporate communication attitudes indirectly exerted substantial influence on store patronage, frequency of visits, and share of wallet through corporate reputation mediation pathways.
• Multi-group moderation analyses across varying levels of retail competition proved that the ATCC maintains stable predictive validity across diverse competitive retail environments.

8. Reliability

Internal consistency and measurement reliability are foundational prerequisites for any robust psychological scale. The ATCC demonstrates exceptionally high reliability metrics despite its parsimonious three-item composition:

Internal Consistency Metrics

• Cronbach’s Alpha (α): The scale achieved a standardized Cronbach’s alpha exceeding 0.82 across the full 5,600-respondent dataset. In psychometric scale design, achieving an alpha above 0.80 with only three items is exemplary, indicating very low error variance without redundancy.
• Composite Reliability (CR): The composite reliability index was reported above 0.84, surpassing Bagozzi and Yi’s (1988) conservative 0.70 benchmark. Composite reliability accounts for the unique error variance of each item, confirming that the indicators reliably capture the construct without inflated collinearity.
• Average Variance Extracted (AVE): Reported at approximately 0.63, substantially exceeding the recommended 0.50 baseline, confirming that true latent score variance outweighs measurement error by almost two-to-one.

Item-to-Total Statistics

Corrected item-total correlations across the three items consistently ranged between 0.66 and 0.76. No single item deletion improved the overall Cronbach’s alpha, proving that every individual question contributes uniquely and critically to the measurement model’s aggregate reliability.

9. Factor Analysis

The dimensional structure of the ATCC was thoroughly analyzed utilizing both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) during preliminary scale trimming and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) within the primary empirical investigation:

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

Principal Axis Factoring with Varimax rotation was utilized during item adaptation from the broader Kelly and Stephenson (1967) inventory. The three items cleanly converged onto a single distinct eigenvalue factor exceeding 1.0 (Kaiser-Guttman rule), explaining more than 68% of the total variance. The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) measure of sampling adequacy yielded values > 0.78, and Bartlett’s Test of Sphericity reached statistical significance (χ², p < 0.001), indicating outstanding matrix factorability.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) and Goodness-of-Fit

Using maximum likelihood estimation in structural equation modeling packages (e.g., LISREL / AMOS), the single-factor measurement model of the ATCC was tested across both independent sub-samples and within the aggregate corporate reputation structural model. The CFA model demonstrated outstanding fit indices across all standard psychometric criteria:

• Standardized Factor Loadings:
  • Informativeness Item: λ = 0.78 (t-value > 25.0)
  • Visibility/Frequency Item: λ = 0.73 (t-value > 22.5)
  • Believability Item: λ = 0.83 (t-value > 28.0)
• Model Fit Indices:
  • Comparative Fit Index (CFI) ≥ 0.98 (exceeds the 0.95 threshold for superior model fit)
  • Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI) ≥ 0.97
  • Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA) ≤ 0.042 (well below the 0.06 stringent ceiling)
  • Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR) ≤ 0.028 (comfortably below the 0.08 limit)
  • Goodness-of-Fit Index (GFI) > 0.99

These CFA statistics demonstrate that the ATCC possesses a clear, unidimensional factor architecture that remains invariant across different market environments and store banner formats.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

The ATCC is structured as an easily administrable survey measurement tool with the following operational specifications:

• Scale Classification: Self-report psychometric inventory; evaluative consumer attitude scale.
• Administration Format: Standardized paper-and-pencil questionnaire, computer-assisted web interview (CAWI), or mobile digital intercept survey.
• Target Population: Consumers, retail patrons, commercial stakeholders, and general adult audiences (ages 18+).
• Item Count: Exactly 3 items evaluating informativeness, visibility/exposure, and credibility/believability.
• Response Scale: 7-point Likert-type response format ranging from 1 (“Strongly Disagree” / “Completely Untrue”) to 7 (“Strongly Agree” / “Completely True”). Alternatively administered using semantic differential end-anchors depending on the broader survey design.
• Completion Time: Approximately 1 to 2 minutes, minimizing respondent burden and attrition in comprehensive multi-topic surveys.
• Scoring Protocol:
  • Items are coded from 1 to 7 in an ascending direction (higher numeric values represent more positive communication attitudes).
  • No reverse-coded items are present in the core 3-item configuration.
  • Composite Score Calculation: An aggregate composite score is computed either as the unweighted arithmetic mean:
    Score = (Item 1 + Item 2 + Item 3) / 3
    or via weighted factor-score regression weights derived from structural equation modeling.
  • Score Interpretation:
    • 1.00 – 2.99: Negative communicative perception; communications are perceived as uninformative, unseen, or untrustworthy.
    • 3.00 – 4.99: Neutral/moderate attitude; communications lack strong cognitive resonance or distinct market visibility.
    • 5.00 – 7.00: Highly positive attitude; communications are recognized as frequent, highly informative, and strongly credible.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The foundational version of the Attitude Toward the Company’s Communications Scale was published in 2013 within the peer-reviewed empirical study titled “Reciprocal effects of the corporate reputation and store equity of retailers” by Bernhard Swoboda, Bettina Berg, and Hanna Schramm-Klein in the Journal of Retailing.

Licensing and Accessibility: The scale was developed for academic research purposes and is accessible within academic scholarship. The original research publication is copyrighted by the journal publisher (Elsevier Inc. on behalf of New York University). Commercial enterprises, market research agencies, or consulting organizations intending to deploy the scale within commercial diagnostic software or proprietary benchmarking databases should consult the publisher’s copyright guidelines or request permissions via the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC). Academic researchers typically utilize the items freely for non-commercial, scholarly research under standard fair academic use citations.

12. References

• Bagozzi, R. P., & Yi, Y. (1988). On the evaluation of structural equation models. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 16(1), 74–94. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02723327
• Eagly, A. H., & Chaiken, S. (1993). The psychology of attitudes. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich College Publishers.
• Friestad, M., & Wright, P. (1994). The persuasion knowledge model: How people cope with persuasion attempts. Journal of Consumer Research, 21(1), 1–31. https://doi.org/10.1086/209380
• Heider, F. (1958). The psychology of interpersonal relations. John Wiley & Sons. https://doi.org/10.1037/10628-000
• Hovland, C. I., & Weiss, W. (1951). The influence of source credibility on communication effectiveness. Public Opinion Quarterly, 15(4), 635–650. https://doi.org/10.1086/266350
• Kelly, R. F., & Stephenson, R. F. (1967). The semantic differential: An information source for designing retail images. Journal of Marketing, 31(4), 36–39. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224296703100407
• Petty, R. E., & Cacioppo, J. T. (1986). The Elaboration Likelihood Model of persuasion. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 19, 123–205. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(08)60214-2
• Spence, M. (1973). Job market signaling. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 87(3), 355–374. https://doi.org/10.2307/1882010
• Swoboda, B., Berg, B., & Schramm-Klein, H. (2013). Reciprocal effects of the corporate reputation and store equity of retailers. Journal of Retailing, 89(4), 447–459. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jretai.2013.06.006
• Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1973). Availability: A heuristic for judging frequency and probability. Cognitive Psychology, 5(2), 207–232. https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0285(73)90033-9
• Zajonc, R. B. (1968). Attitudinal effects of mere exposure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 9(2p2), 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0025848

13. Items of the Scale