The Brand Morality (BM) Scale

1. Abstract

The Brand Morality (BM) Scale, also designated in consumer psychometrics as the Perceived Brand Morality Scale (PBMS), is an empirically validated multidimensional instrument developed by Wei, Ekinci, and Sit (2025). Designed to address critical conceptual ambiguities in the relationship marketing and corporate social responsibility (CSR) literatures, the scale formally operationalizes and measures consumers’ perceptions of a brand’s moral conduct, explicitly delineating brand morality as a distinct psychological construct from conventional brand ethics. The instrument was constructed following rigorous scale development paradigms outlined by Churchill (1979) and DeVellis (2016), drawing its core theoretical grounding from Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) and Morality-as-Cooperation (MAC) Theory. Comprising 12 psychometrically refined items rated on a 7-point Likert scale, the BM Scale captures three fundamental dimensions: Brand Care (BC), Brand Compliance (BCO), and Brand Competence (BCP). Psychometric evaluation across cross-national consumer cohorts from the United Kingdom (via Prolific) and the People’s Republic of China established exceptional psychometric stability. Exploratory factor analysis revealed a robust three-factor solution accounting for 64% of total variance, which was subsequently corroborated via confirmatory factor analysis exhibiting exemplary goodness-of-fit indices (χ²/df = 2.07, CFI = 0.96, TLI = 0.95, GFI = 0.92, RMSEA = 0.07, SRMR = 0.10). Internal consistency across all subscales demonstrated Cronbach’s alpha and composite reliability coefficients exceeding the 0.70 benchmark. Furthermore, the scale exhibited pronounced convergent, discriminant, concurrent, and predictive validity against key behavioral outcomes, including brand trust, brand honesty, brand reliability, customer satisfaction, and word-of-mouth advocacy.

2. Keywords

Brand Morality, Perceived Brand Morality Scale, Brand Ethics, Moral Foundations Theory, Morality-as-Cooperation, Brand Care, Brand Compliance, Brand Competence, Consumer Psychometrics, Scale Validation

3. Authors

The Brand Morality Scale was authored and psychometrically validated by:

• Yunyi Wei — School of Economics and Management, Department of Marketing, Yantai Institute of Technology, Yantai, Shandong, China.
• Yuksel Ekinci — School of Strategy, Marketing and Innovation (SMI), Faculty of Business and Law, University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, United Kingdom. ORCID: 0000-0001-5063-013X.
• Kokho (Jason) Sit — Global School of Strategy, Marketing and Innovation (SMI), Faculty of Business and Law, University of Portsmouth, Richmond Building, Portland Street, Portsmouth, Hampshire, PO1 3DE, United Kingdom. ORCID: 0000-0003-3839-1046. Correspondence: [email protected].

4. Purpose

The primary purpose of the Brand Morality Scale is to resolve a persistent conceptual entanglement within marketing literature: the theoretical and empirical conflation between brand ethics and brand morality. Historically, consumer researchers have treated ethics and morality interchangeably, frequently operationalizing corporate ethical performance through the lens of legal compliance, minimum contractual adherence, or broad philanthropic initiatives. However, contemporary consumer-brand relationships require a far more granular psychometric distinction. While brand ethics often describes prescriptive, institutionalized norms or minimum legal standards of corporate conduct, brand morality captures an evaluative perception regarding whether an entity acts as an intrinsically virtuous social actor guided by benevolence, cooperative sacrifice, and societal welfare.

In modern consumption contexts characterized by widespread corporate transparency, environmental, social, and governance (ESG) scrutiny, and brand activism, consumers continuously evaluate whether brand behaviors stem from opportunistic compliance or authentic moral conviction. The BM Scale equips researchers and organizational strategists with a standardized diagnostic tool to quantify these nuanced consumer perceptions. From a research standpoint, the scale enables empirical investigations into the structural pathways linking consumer moral judgment to cognitive, affective, and behavioral loyalty metrics. From an applied managerial standpoint, the instrument provides brand custodians with an empirical framework to assess vulnerabilities, predict reputation fallout, benchmark corporate communication strategies, and monitor whether consumers perceive corporate initiatives as genuine or performative.

5. Psychological Construct

The construct of Brand Morality captures consumers’ subjective psychological appraisals of a commercial brand’s capacity, willingness, and systemic commitment to act as a pro-social, cooperative, and ethically grounded entity. Rather than viewing morality as a unidimensional trait, the scale operationalizes it across three interconnected yet distinct dimensions:

Brand Care (BC)

Brand Care represents the affective, benevolent, and welfare-oriented dimension of brand morality. Grounded in psychological paradigms of communal sharing and altruism, this subscale captures consumer evaluations of a brand’s empathy, human-centered dedication, and willingness to protect customer interests even when doing so necessitates sacrificing immediate transactional gains or commercial profit. Brands demonstrating high Brand Care are perceived as treating consumers as valued relational partners rather than economic utilities.

Brand Compliance (BCO)

Brand Compliance assesses a brand’s fidelity to broader institutional, cultural, and societal rules. This dimension encompasses strict observance of statutory laws, transparent tax accountability across jurisdictional boundaries, respect for regional customs and cultural traditions in marketing communications, and the equitable, non-exploitative treatment of its human capital. Compliance in this framework reflects the fundamental baseline of cooperative societal membership, ensuring that an enterprise operates in harmony with the socio-legal ecosystem in which it functions.

Brand Competence (BCP)

Brand Competence operationalizes the instrumental and functional efficacy of the brand. Rooted in the Stereotype Content Model (Fiske et al., 2002), competence evaluates dependability, domain-specific expertise, and the consistent delivery of high-quality goods and services. Within the moral matrix, competence serves a critical psychological role: moral intentions and pro-social pledges lack substantive value if an organization lacks the operational capability, technical mastery, and structural reliability required to execute its commitments without causing consumer detriment.

6. Theoretical Framework

The development of the Brand Morality Scale synthesizes two influential theoretical foundations from contemporary social and evolutionary psychology:

Moral Foundations Theory (MFT)

Formulated by Jonathan Haidt and colleagues, MFT proposes that human moral judgment relies on innate psychological modules evolved to resolve recurrent social dilemmas. The primary foundations relevant to consumer evaluations include Care/Harm (sensitivity to suffering and the protection of vulnerable stakeholders), Fairness/Cheating (equity, reciprocity, and rule compliance), and Loyalty/Betrayal (commitment to group welfare). The BM Scale translates these modular intuitions into consumer-brand dynamics, demonstrating that consumers hold brands accountable to the same universal intuitive foundations that govern interpersonal moral appraisals.

Morality-as-Cooperation (MAC) Theory

Developed by Oliver Scott Curry and associates (2019), MAC theory posits that morality comprises a collection of biological and cultural solutions designed to facilitate cooperative social living. MAC identifies distinct cooperative spheres, including kin altruism, mutualism, reciprocity, division of labor, deference to authority, and fair distribution. In the BM Scale, the cooperative obligations of reciprocal loyalty and welfare allocation directly underpin Brand Care, while cooperative conformity to societal compacts and regulatory parity underpins Brand Compliance. By integrating MAC, the scale captures how brands function as moral cooperative partners within market ecosystems.

7. Validity

The psychometric evaluation conducted by Wei, Ekinci, and Sit (2025) provides comprehensive evidence supporting the construct, convergent, discriminant, concurrent, and predictive validity of the scale:

Construct and Factorial Validity

Construct validity was demonstrated across iterative exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. Items loaded cleanly onto their hypothesized dimensions without cross-loadings above 0.30, confirming that the three-factor structure faithfully represents the multidimensional domain of perceived brand morality.

Convergent Validity

Convergent validity was verified using Average Variance Extracted (AVE) calculations across all structural dimensions. The AVE coefficients for Brand Care, Brand Compliance, and Brand Competence consistently surpassed the canonical 0.50 threshold, establishing that the latent variables explain more than half of the indicator variance.

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity was established via the Fornell-Larcker criterion and correlation matrix analysis. The square root of the AVE for each factor substantially exceeded the inter-factor correlations as well as the correlations between the BM dimensions and five critical relational outcome constructs: brand trust, brand honesty, brand reliability, customer satisfaction, and likelihood of recommending the brand.

Concurrent Validity

Concurrent validity was examined by regressing the scale’s three dimensions against the recognized single-item metric of corporate ethical performance developed by Brunk (2012). The three dimensions of the BM Scale jointly accounted for a substantial portion of variance (R² = 0.63, p < 0.01), confirming that the instrument successfully reflects overarching consumer moral evaluations while providing far greater diagnostic nuance.

Predictive Validity

Multiple linear regression analyses demonstrated strong predictive validity. The dimensions of Brand Care, Compliance, and Competence explained statistically significant variance across brand trust, brand honesty, brand reliability, overall customer satisfaction, and positive word-of-mouth recommendations, substantiating the scale’s operational utility in commercial research.

8. Reliability

The internal consistency and measurement reliability of the Brand Morality Scale have been rigorously demonstrated across diverse empirical samples:

• Cronbach’s Alpha (α): The internal consistency coefficients for each of the three subscales (Care, Compliance, Competence) uniformly exceeded the recommended psychometric threshold of 0.70, reflecting high inter-item homogeneity within each dimension.
• Composite Reliability (CR): Composite reliability scores for all latent factors exceeded 0.70, further verifying measurement stability without being compromised by varying indicator weights.
• Cross-Cultural Reliability: Replicated testing across a Western consumer panel from the United Kingdom (Prolific) and an Eastern consumer cohort from mainland China yielded comparable reliability metrics, confirming cross-cultural measurement invariance and linguistic robustness across English and Chinese instrument versions.

9. Factor Analysis

Scale construction adhered to the multi-stage recommendations of Churchill (1979) and DeVellis (2016), utilizing sequential factor-analytic validation procedures across independent samples:

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

An initial pool of candidate items generated from qualitative elicitations and literature reviews was subjected to principal axis factoring with oblique rotation. Items demonstrating poor factor loadings (< 0.50), high cross-loadings (> 0.35), or conceptual redundancy were iteratively removed. The resulting 12-item exploratory model yielded a clean three-factor solution that accounted for 64% of the total variance, clearly delineating Brand Care, Brand Compliance, and Brand Competence.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

The 12-item, three-factor structure was subsequently tested through structural equation modeling using a confirmatory framework. The measurement model demonstrated excellent statistical fit to the empirical data across standard structural fit indices:

• Relative Chi-Square (χ²/df): 2.07 (p < 0.001), well below the conservative cutoff value of 3.0.
• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): 0.96 (surpassing the standard ≥ 0.95 criterion).
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): 0.95 (surpassing the standard ≥ 0.95 criterion).
• Goodness-of-Fit Index (GFI): 0.92.
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): 0.07 (falling below the acceptable ≤ 0.08 threshold).
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): 0.10.

This structural fit was independently replicated and confirmed in the Chinese consumer validation cohort, verifying cross-national structural equivalence.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Instrument Name: Brand Morality (BM) Scale (Perceived Brand Morality Scale – PBMS)
• Test Type: Original psychometric inventory / self-report questionnaire
• Target Population: Adult consumers (18 years of age and older) across commercial goods and services markets
• Item Count: 12 items across 3 subscales
• Subscale Architecture:
  • Brand Care (BC): 4 items (Items 1–4)
  • Brand Compliance (BCO): 4 items (Items 5–8)
  • Brand Competence (BCP): 4 items (Items 9–12)
• Response Format: 7-point Likert scale (1 = Strongly Disagree, 2 = Disagree, 3 = Slightly Disagree, 4 = Neither Agree nor Disagree, 5 = Slightly Agree, 6 = Agree, 7 = Strongly Agree)
• Administration Method: Electronic survey administration (online consumer panels or digital research questionnaires)
• Available Validated Languages: English, Simplified Chinese
• Scoring Procedure:
  • Subscale Scores: Calculated by computing the arithmetic mean across items corresponding to each individual dimension (Care: items 1–4; Compliance: items 5–8; Competence: items 9–12).
  • Overall Score: Where theoretically justified for higher-order modeling, an overarching Perceived Brand Morality index can be computed by averaging all 12 items. However, retaining disaggregated subscale scores is strongly recommended to preserve diagnostic precision.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Brand Morality Scale was formally published in 2025 in Psychology & Marketing by authors Yunyi Wei, Yuksel Ekinci, and Kokho (Jason) Sit. The instrument is designated for academic research and educational instructional use free of licensing fees, provided that appropriate scholarly attribution is maintained. Commercial applications, large-scale enterprise benchmarking, or proprietary consulting deployments should contact the corresponding author, Dr. Kokho (Jason) Sit (Global School of Strategy, Marketing and Innovation, University of Portsmouth, Richmond Building, Portland Street, Portsmouth, Hampshire, PO1 3DE, United Kingdom; Email: [email protected]), to request formal permission.

12. References

• Brunk, K. H. (2012). Un/ethical company: An examination of consumer perceptions of corporate reputation for (un)ethical behaviour. Journal of Business Ethics, 107(2), 255–265. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-011-1036-7
• Churchill, G. A., Jr. (1979). A paradigm for developing better measures of marketing constructs. Journal of Marketing Research, 16(1), 64–73. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224377901600110
• Curry, O. S., Mullins, D. A., & Whitehouse, H. (2019). Is it good to cooperate? Testing the theory of morality-as-cooperation in 60 societies. Current Anthropology, 60(1), 47–69. https://doi.org/10.1086/701478
• DeVellis, R. F. (2016). Scale development: Theory and applications (4th ed.). SAGE Publications.
• 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
• Haidt, J., & Graham, J. (2007). When morality opposes justice: Conservatives have moral intuitions that liberals may not recognize. Social Justice Research, 20(1), 98–116. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11211-007-0034-z
• Wei, Y., Ekinci, Y., & Sit, K. (J.). (2025). More than law‐abiding: A multi‐staged consumer study on brand morality. Psychology & Marketing, 42(2), 600–614. https://doi.org/10.1002/mar.22139

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)