Brand Admirability

Abstract

The Brand Admirability scale is a concise, unidimensional psychometric instrument developed and validated in consumer psychology to measure the degree to which consumers perceive a commercial brand as inspiring, praiseworthy, and worthy of high esteem. Introduced in marketing scholarship by Septianto, Seo, and Zhao (2022) in the Journal of Advertising, the scale was operationalized to investigate the downstream psychological mechanisms connecting advertising appeals (specifically warmth versus competence appeals) to consumer evaluations in the contexts of luxury and sustainable branding. Comprising three self-report items administered on a 7-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (“Strongly disagree”) to 7 (“Strongly agree”), the instrument quantifies an affective-cognitive appraisal rooted in the psychology of other-praising moral emotions. Psychometric evaluations demonstrate exceptional internal consistency reliability (with Cronbach’s alpha coefficients routinely exceeding α = .88 and composite reliability values surpassing .90), robust convergent validity with constructs such as brand attitude and purchase intentions, and strong discriminant validity against broader constructs such as general brand liking, brand competence, and brand warmth. By capturing the elevated socio-emotional status attributed to brands that align competence with prosocial or pro-environmental virtue, the Brand Admirability scale provides empirical researchers and marketing practitioners with an efficient, theoretically sound measurement tool for evaluating advertising effectiveness, corporate social responsibility initiatives, and brand equity development.

Keywords

Brand Admirability, Consumer Psychology, Other-Praising Emotions, Stereotype Content Model, Warmth Appeals, Competence Appeals, Sustainable Branding, Luxury Branding, Construal Level Theory, Advertising Persuasion

Authors

The Brand Admirability measurement tool was operationalized in advertising research by the following academic researchers:

• Felix Septianto, Ph.D. — Associate Professor of Marketing, UQ Business School, The University of Queensland, St Lucia, Australia. Dr. Septianto’s research program investigates behavioral decision-making, consumer emotions, advertising persuasion, and social marketing. Contact: [email protected].
• Yuri Seo, Ph.D. — Professor of Marketing, Department of Marketing, The University of Auckland Business School, Auckland, New Zealand. Dr. Seo specializes in consumer culture theory, cross-cultural marketing, luxury brand management, and digital consumption dynamics. Contact: [email protected].
• Fang Zhao, Ph.D. — Professor of Strategy and Innovation, Staffordshire University Business School, Stoke-on-Trent, United Kingdom. Dr. Zhao conducts research across strategic management, entrepreneurship, sustainable enterprise systems, and marketing communication.

Purpose

The fundamental purpose of the Brand Admirability scale is to provide a standardized, psychometrically rigorous, and parsimonious metric capable of capturing consumers’ elevated psychological evaluations of a brand as an entity possessing superior virtue, inspiration, and praiseworthy character. In contemporary market environments, consumer judgments extend well beyond standard functional utilities or generic brand attitudes (i.e., whether a brand is simply viewed as “good” or “bad”). Instead, modern consumers frequently evaluate brands through socio-moral and emotional lenses, questioning whether an organization’s practices reflect meaningful societal contributions, environmental stewardship, or extraordinary craft.

Within consumer psychology and advertising research, the scale serves critical explanatory functions. Specifically, Septianto, Seo, and Zhao (2022) developed this scale to examine the mediating mechanisms through which warmth-focused advertising appeals influence consumers’ downstream purchase intentions and willingness to advocate for sustainable luxury brands. While luxury brands traditionally emphasize status, exclusivity, and supreme technical competence, sustainable luxury initiatives require an infusion of warmth, empathy, and ethical commitment. The Brand Admirability scale captures the precise psychological inflection point where perceived warmth and competence converge to produce feelings of inspiration and moral-aesthetic praise.

The scale holds extensive application across both academic and practical domains:

• Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Pro-Environmental Marketing: Evaluating how ethical transformations, fair-trade commitments, and decarbonization strategies alter consumers’ higher-order emotional appraisals of an enterprise.
• Advertising Testing and Copy Development: Diagnostic pre-testing of advertising appeals (e.g., warmth vs. competence vs. combined appeals) to determine which executional styles maximize emotional elevation rather than mere product recall.
• Luxury and Heritage Brand Strategy: Measuring the degree to which prestigious brands maintain veneration and inspiration without alienating audiences through perceptions of cold arrogance.
• Brand Crisis and Moral Transgression Recovery: Tracking longitudinal recovery trajectories following ethical lapses, where restoring basic competence is insufficient to recover lost moral admiration.

Psychological Construct

The psychological construct of brand admirability represents an evaluative socio-cognitive and affective state wherein a consumer perceives an organization or commercial brand to embody exceptional standards of excellence, moral integrity, and social contribution. Rather than operating purely as a valence-based attitude (e.g., pleasantness or favorability), admirability belongs to the taxonomic family of other-praising moral emotions and elevated social judgments (Algoe & Haidt, 2009).

Core Dimensions of the Construct

Although captured via a single, unidimensional factor in empirical modeling, the construct theoretically synthesizes three closely integrated psychological facets:

• Moral and Ethical Praiseworthiness: The appraisal that the entity has exceeded baseline legal and societal norms to act with genuine benevolence, prosocial orientation, and ethical fortitude. Praiseworthiness reflects an external attribution of positive moral intentionality.
• Aspirational Inspiration: The capacity of the brand to stimulate uplifting feelings, motivate self-improvement, and evoke forward-looking behavioral aspirations in the observer. When consumers find a brand inspiring, the brand functions as an ideological or behavioral exemplar.
• Veneration and Esteemed Standing: The overall attribution of high socio-reputational status earned through demonstrated achievement, quality, and commitment. This dimension distinguishes admiration from mere sympathy; one admires entities perceived as both morally worthy and practically capable.

Construct Differentiation

To avoid theoretical conflation, brand admirability must be distinguished from related brand perception constructs:

• Brand Admirability vs. Brand Attitude: While brand attitude is an omnibus summary evaluation of an object along a positive-negative bipolar spectrum (e.g., bad/good, unfavorable/favorable), admirability represents a distinct, high-arousal, upward-looking evaluation grounded in respect and inspiration.
• Brand Admirability vs. Brand Love: Brand love centers on interpersonal-style intimacy, emotional attachment, passionate engagement, and perceived self-brand integration (Batra, Ahuvia, & Bagozzi, 2012). In contrast, admirability can be experienced at an objective psychological distance without requiring deep personal integration or emotional dependency.
• Brand Admirability vs. Brand Trust: Brand trust reflects consumer confidence in an organization’s reliability, integrity, and operational predictability. While trust forms an essential cognitive antecedent, admirability incorporates an uplifting emotional resonance that exceeds expectations of mere transactional safety.

Theoretical Framework

The Brand Admirability scale is anchored in three interconnected theoretical traditions within social and cognitive psychology:

1. The Stereotype Content Model (SCM) and Brands as Intentional Agents

The primary theoretical foundation draws upon the Stereotype Content Model (Fiske, Cuddy, Glick, & Xu, 2002) and its consumer behavior extension, the Brands as Intentional Agents Framework (BIAF; Kervyn, Fiske, & Malone, 2012). According to the SCM, human beings evaluate social targets along two fundamental, evolutionary dimensions: warmth (perceived intentions: friendliness, helpfulness, sincerity, morality) and competence (perceived capability: intelligence, skill, efficacy, resources).

In social perception, targets rated high on both warmth and competence elicit the unique emotional response of admiration, whereas high competence combined with low warmth evokes envy, and high warmth combined with low competence evokes pity. Septianto et al. (2022) applied this framework to advertising strategy. They demonstrated that while luxury brands naturally project competence through high price and craftsmanship, they often lack perceived warmth. By deploying warmth-based advertising appeals, luxury brands can achieve the dual perception of high warmth and high competence, thereby catalyzing brand admirability.

2. Construal Level Theory (CLT)

The second pillar informing the scale’s empirical deployment is Construal Level Theory (Trope & Liberman, 2010). CLT posits that psychological distance (temporal, spatial, social, or hypothetical) influences mental representations. Objects that are psychologically distant are represented via high-level, abstract, primary, and goal-directed construals, whereas psychologically proximal objects are processed via low-level, concrete, contextualized, and pragmatic construals.

Admirability, being an abstract and morally elevated evaluation, operates predominantly as a high-level construal. Septianto et al. (2022) demonstrated that the effect of warmth appeals on brand admirability is moderated by construal level: consumers engaged in high-level (abstract) cognitive processing are significantly more receptive to warmth appeals in luxury sustainable advertising, which subsequently amplifies perceived brand admirability and drives behavioral intentions.

3. The Psychology of Other-Praising Moral Elevation

Drawing on Jonathan Haidt’s (2003) typology of moral emotions, admiration represents an other-praising reaction elicited by witnessing excellence in others. Unlike pride (which is self-focused) or gratitude (which requires direct personal benefit), admiration is triggered by observing commendable behavior in another actor, regardless of direct personal gain. In consumer contexts, observing a commercial entity commit substantial resources to ecological sustainability or ethical welfare elicits this vicarious praise, positioning brand admirability as the emotional and cognitive consequence of perceived corporate virtue.

Validity

Empirical validation of the Brand Admirability scale has yielded robust evidence across multiple validity domains within experimental and cross-sectional consumer research designs.

Construct and Convergent Validity

Construct validity is substantiated by high, statistically significant factor loadings in structural equation modeling (SEM) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). In the studies conducted by Septianto et al. (2022), all three items loaded substantially onto the latent admirability factor, with standardized factor loadings consistently exceeding λ = .85 (ranging between .86 and .94, p < .001). The Average Variance Extracted (AVE) routinely exceeds .75, well above the conventional benchmark of .50 established by Fornell and Larcker (1981). Convergent validity is further supported by substantial positive correlations with conceptually aligned constructs:

• Brand Warmth Appraisals: r values ranging from .54 to .68 (p < .001).
• Brand Competence Appraisals: r values ranging from .49 to .62 (p < .001).
• General Brand Attitude: r values between .60 and .71 (p < .001).

Discriminant Validity

Despite substantial positive associations with general evaluative attitudes, the Brand Admirability scale demonstrates rigorous discriminant validity. Application of the Fornell-Larcker criterion confirms that the square root of the AVE for the brand admirability latent variable (typically √AVE ≥ .87) exceeds its bivariate correlations with all adjoining latent constructs (including brand attitude, perceived luxury value, and message credibility). Furthermore, modern heterotrait-monotrait ratio of correlations (HTMT) analyses demonstrate values below the conservative .85 threshold, proving that the scale captures an emotional-inspirational facet distinct from general commercial liking or product utility.

Predictive and Nomological Validity

The predictive and nomological validity of the scale was established through moderated mediation modeling (Preacher & Hayes PROCESS Model 7/8). Septianto et al. (2022) revealed that brand admirability functions as a significant indirect mediator translating the interaction between advertising appeal type (warmth vs. competence) and cognitive construal level into downstream outcomes, including:

• Purchase Intentions: Brand admirability significantly predicts consumers’ willingness to purchase premium sustainable goods (β ≈ .38 to .46, p < .001).
• Word-of-Mouth (WOM) Advocacy: Admirability accounts for significant incremental variance in willingness to recommend the brand to peers.
• Price Premium Acceptance: Consumers reporting elevated brand admirability scores demonstrate higher willingness to tolerate ethical price premiums.

Reliability

The Brand Admirability scale demonstrates strong internal consistency reliability across diverse experimental conditions, product categories, and consumer samples.

Internal Consistency Metrics

In the primary empirical investigations reported by Septianto et al. (2022), the scale demonstrated the following reliability parameters across distinct experimental studies:

• Study 1 (Luxury Sustainable Fashion): Cronbach’s α = .91; Composite Reliability (CR) = .92.
• Study 2 (High-End Sustainable Cosmetics): Cronbach’s α = .89; Composite Reliability (CR) = .90.
• Study 3 (Automotive Sustainable Technology): Cronbach’s α = .93; Composite Reliability (CR) = .93.

Across these investigations, the average inter-item correlation coefficients remained consistently high (typically r = .72 to .81), indicating strong internal coherence among the three indicators. Corrected item-total correlations across all items routinely surpass .78, well above the acceptable psychometric threshold of .40.

Stability and Cross-Sample Robustness

The scale maintains robust reliability coefficients across heterogeneous demographic groups, including adult consumer panels recruited via Prolific and Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk), as well as university student samples. Measurement invariance testing across experimental conditions (warmth appeal vs. competence appeal conditions) confirmed full configural and metric invariance, establishing that respondents interpret the three scale items equivalently across differing advertising contexts.

Factor Analysis

The dimensional architecture of the Brand Admirability scale has been scrutinized using both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA).

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

When subjected to principal axis factoring or maximum likelihood extraction with oblique or orthogonal rotation, the three items reliably resolve into a single, dominant factor. Key EFA diagnostics include:

• Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) Measure of Sampling Adequacy: Values consistently exceed .75 (frequently > .80), indicating excellent data factorability.
• Bartlett’s Test of Sphericity: Highly statistically significant across all datasets (χ² values > 450.00, p < .0001), rejecting the identity matrix hypothesis.
• Eigenvalues and Variance Explained: A single eigenvalue substantially greater than 1.0 (typically λ > 2.45) is extracted, accounting for approximately 80% to 88% of the total item variance. No secondary factor achieves an eigenvalue exceeding 0.40.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Because a three-item, single-factor measurement model possesses zero degrees of freedom (just-identified or saturated model), fit indices are typically evaluated within multi-construct measurement models containing adjoining latent variables (e.g., brand competence, brand warmth, brand attitude, purchase intention). In these full measurement models, the brand admirability latent variable exhibits superior model fit criteria:

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): > .98 (frequently .99 to 1.00)
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): > .97
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): < .05 (90% CI [.000, .068])
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): < .03

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The Brand Admirability scale is formatted as an explicit self-report survey questionnaire designed for rapid integration into experimental paradigms, digital tracking studies, and paper-and-pencil surveys.

• Instrument Name: Brand Admirability Scale
• Original Authors: Felix Septianto, Yuri Seo, and Fang Zhao (2022)
• Construct Measured: Consumer perception of a brand’s praiseworthiness, inspirational qualities, and moral-aesthetic admirability
• Test Type: Standardized self-report rating scale
• Administration Format: Web-based survey, computer-assisted self-interviewing (CASI), or paper-based psychological inventory
• Target Population: Adult consumers (ages 18+) evaluating commercial or non-profit brand stimuli
• Number of Items: 3 items
• Response Format: 7-point Likert scale (1 = Strongly disagree, 7 = Strongly agree)
• Scoring Procedure: Items are averaged to create an overall brand admirability score, with higher scores reflecting greater perceived admirability. There are no reverse-coded items.
• Estimated Completion Time: Less than 1 minute (approximately 20–40 seconds)

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Brand Admirability scale was formally published in 2022 within the Journal of Advertising by Taylor & Francis:

• Publication Year: 2022
• Academic Research Use: In accordance with standard academic publishing conventions, the three items of the Brand Admirability scale may be reproduced and administered freely without licensing fees for non-commercial, scholarly research, thesis investigations, and academic study replications, provided proper bibliographic attribution is cited.
• Commercial and Proprietary Use: Commercial entities, market research firms, and corporate consultancies seeking to deploy the scale in proprietary commercial testing platforms should consult the copyright policies of the publisher (Taylor & Francis Group) and obtain approval from the primary authors where appropriate.

References

Below are primary academic references documenting the theoretical foundation, psychometric validation, and empirical application of the Brand Admirability scale:

• Algoe, S. B., & Haidt, J. (2009). Witnessing excellence in action: The other-praising emotions of elevation, gratitude, and admiration. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 4(2), 105–127. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760802650519
• Batra, R., Ahuvia, A., & Bagozzi, R. P. (2012). Brand love. Journal of Marketing, 76(2), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1509/jm.09.0339
• Fiske, S. T., Cuddy, A. J., Glick, P., & Xu, J. (2002). A model of (often mixed) stereotype content: Competence and warmth respectively follow from perceived status and competition. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82(6), 878–902. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.82.6.878
• 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
• Haidt, J. (2003). The moral emotions. In R. J. Davidson, K. R. Scherer, & H. H. Goldsmith (Eds.), Handbook of Affective Sciences (pp. 852–870). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1037/10594-000
• Kervyn, N., Fiske, S. T., & Malone, C. (2012). Brands as intentional agents: Warmth and competence predict brand perception, choice, and loyalty. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 22(2), 166–175. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcps.2011.09.006
• MacKenzie, S. B., & Lutz, R. J. (1989). An empirical examination of the structural antecedents of attitude toward the ad in an advertising pretesting context. Journal of Marketing, 53(2), 48–65. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224298905300204
• Septianto, F., Seo, Y., & Zhao, F. (2022). The effects of competence and warmth appeals on luxury and sustainable brand advertising: The moderating role of construal level. Journal of Advertising, 51(3), 369–384. https://doi.org/10.1080/00913367.2021.1980470
• Trope, Y., & Liberman, N. (2010). Construal-level theory of psychological distance. Psychological Review, 117(2), 440–463. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0018963

Items of the Scale