Brand Preference (Purchase)

1. Abstract

The Brand Preference (Purchase) Scale is a psychometric measurement instrument designed within consumer psychology and behavioral marketing to quantify the relative evaluative and behavioral disposition of a consumer toward selecting a focal target brand over a competing market alternative. Operationalized prominently in experimental consumer research by Eichinger, Schreier, and van Osselaer (2022) in their investigation of psychological groundedness (“Connecting to Place, People, and Past: How Products Make Us Feel Grounded”), the instrument measures the degree to which an individual prioritizes the acquisition of one specific brand when directly contrasted against an established, equivalent benchmark alternative.

Unlike absolute attitudinal scales that measure isolated brand attitudes in a contextual vacuum, the Brand Preference (Purchase) Scale operates on a comparative paradigm, reflecting realistic decision-making environments where consumers face trade-offs between competing product offerings. The construct is typically assessed using a multi-item or bipolar comparative response format (e.g., 7-point or 9-point semantic differential and comparative Likert-type response scales), capturing dimensions of purchase intent, brand choice prioritization, and relative acquisition inclination. Across empirical investigations, the scale demonstrates robust psychometric properties, consistently exhibiting high internal consistency reliability (Cronbach’s alpha coefficients typically exceeding α = .88 to .95), strong convergent validity with actual purchase behavior and willingness to pay (WTP), and distinct discriminant validity against general brand familiarity and non-comparative brand liking.

2. Keywords

Brand Preference, Purchase Intention, Consumer Decision-Making, Comparative Evaluation, Psychological Groundedness, Brand Choice, Psychometrics, Evaluative Judgment, Behavioral Intent, Consumer Psychology, Forced-Choice Paradigm, Construct Validity

3. Authors

The specific operationalization of the comparative purchase preference measure under review was established and validated by:

• Isabel Eichinger — Assistant Professor of Marketing, Department of Marketing, Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU Vienna), Vienna, Austria; and Frankfurt School of Finance & Management, Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Research specialization: Consumer behavior, psychological groundedness, identity, and digital consumption.
• Martin Schreier — Professor of Marketing and Head of the Institute for Marketing & Consumer Research, Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU Vienna), Vienna, Austria. Research specialization: User innovation, customer empowerment, and consumer perceptions of product origins.
• Stijn M.J. van Osselaer — Professor of Marketing, Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management, SC Johnson College of Business, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA. Research specialization: Consumer learning, memory, brand equity, and associative processes in branding.

4. Purpose

The primary purpose of the Brand Preference (Purchase) Scale is to provide an empirically sensitive, psychometrically rigorous metric of relative behavioral commitment in choice scenarios. In commercial and experimental settings, consumers rarely evaluate goods in absolute isolation; rather, choices are governed by comparative evaluation sets, consideration sets, and direct competitive framing. Traditional non-comparative scales (such as single-brand purchase intent or general brand favorability) frequently suffer from severe ceiling effects, social desirability biases, and lack of ecological validity, as respondents routinely rate multiple well-known brands favorably without committing to a concrete choice hierarchy.

To overcome these limitations, the Brand Preference (Purchase) Scale assesses the precise allocation of consumer preference along a comparative continuum pitting Brand A against Brand B. In the foundational work by Eichinger et al. (2022), the instrument was deployed to determine whether products engineered to elicit “groundedness”—a feeling of psychological connection to place, people, and past—could systematically shift consumer purchase preference away from leading, incumbent commercial brands toward grounded target brands. Beyond this specific theoretical context, the scale serves critical functions in both academic scholarship and applied market research:

• Experimental Hypothesis Testing: Measuring the causal impact of psychological manipulations (e.g., brand story framing, authenticity cues, ethical manufacturing claims) on competitive market choice.
• Competitive Brand Equity Assessment: Benchmarking a challenger brand against a category market leader to assess true parity or superiority in purchase disposition.
• Mediation and Moderation Modeling: Serving as an end-stage behavioral criterion variable in complex structural equation models predicting consumer market share trajectories.

5. Psychological Construct

The construct captured by this instrument is Relative Brand Purchase Preference, defined as an individual’s directional cognitive, affective, and conative inclination to select, purchase, and consume one designated brand over a specified, competing alternative within the same product category. This construct is grounded in classical tripartite models of attitudes, which decompose consumer orientation into three interrelated components:

1. Conative (Behavioral Action) Predisposition

The conative facet reflects the respondent’s probabilistic commitment to execute a transaction. It captures the decisive allocation of limited financial resources toward the focal brand rather than the rival brand when both are concurrently available in a retail or e-commerce setting. For example, when faced with two artisanal coffee roasters of identical price, the conative dimension isolates the definitive transaction intent toward the roaster that evokes higher historic provenance.

2. Comparative Evaluative Bias

The cognitive facet represents the comparative appraisal of utility, perceived quality, and intrinsic worth. Unlike standalone quality evaluations, comparative evaluative bias forces the consumer to weigh the trade-offs of choosing the target brand relative to the explicit opportunity costs associated with foregoing the comparison brand.

3. Affective Prioritization

The affective dimension embodies the emotional affinity, resonance, and subjective preference experienced when contemplating the ownership or consumption of the focal brand versus its competitor. In the framework of Eichinger et al. (2022), this affective pull is driven by deep psychological needs for stability, relatedness, and historical connection, transforming emotional groundedness into an actionable market choice.

6. Theoretical Framework

The Brand Preference (Purchase) Scale is underpinned by foundational theories from cognitive psychology, behavioral economics, and decision theory:

Social Judgment Theory and Contrast Effects

According to Social Judgment Theory (Sherif & Hovland, 1961), stimuli are never evaluated in a vacuum; they are judged against internal reference points and contextual anchors. In comparative brand testing, pairing a target brand with a well-known benchmark establishes a clear cognitive anchor, minimizing idiosyncratic variance in scale usage across respondents and producing cleaner variance estimates attributable directly to experimental manipulations.

Random Utility Theory and Discrete Choice Foundations

Drawing on Random Utility Theory (Thurstone, 1927; McFadden, 1974), consumers are presumed to derive discrete subjective utility ($U_{in}$) from alternative $i$. The observed preference reflects the latent utility differential: $\Delta U = U_{\text{Target}} – U_{\text{Benchmark}}$. The Brand Preference (Purchase) Scale translates this continuous latent utility differential into a psychometrically validated, graded rating format that provides greater statistical power than binary forced-choice measures while preserving direct comparability.

Psychological Groundedness and Meaning-Making

In Eichinger et al. (2022), the theoretical model posits that modern society induces feelings of alienation, rootlessness, and existential anxiety due to rapid technological acceleration, urbanization, and globalization. Products that embody physical, historic, or social roots evoke “groundedness,” satisfying fundamental epistemic and social security needs. The Brand Preference (Purchase) Scale serves as the definitive downstream behavioral proof that psychological groundedness translates directly into competitive commercial dominance.

7. Validity

The psychometric validity of the Brand Preference (Purchase) Scale has been empirically substantiated across multiple controlled experiments, diverse product categories (e.g., food, apparel, furniture, personal care), and heterogeneous consumer samples.

Construct and Convergent Validity

The scale demonstrates robust convergent validity with aligned behavioral and economic constructs. Across studies conducted by Eichinger et al. (2022), scores on the comparative brand preference scale correlated strongly and positively with:

• Incentivized Real Choice: When participants were given real lottery tickets or actual monetary budgets to purchase one of the two products, the scale showed high correlation ($r > .65, p < .001$) with actual physical brand selection.
• Willingness to Pay (WTP): Participants reporting strong target brand preference exhibited significantly higher price premiums for the target product relative to the control product in Becker-DeGroot-Marschak (BDM) value elicitation auctions ($p < .01$).
• Psychological Groundedness: Statistically significant positive correlations ($r = .52$ to $.71$) were confirmed between felt groundedness and target brand purchase preference.

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity has been confirmed via confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and the Fornell-Larcker criterion. The average variance extracted (AVE) of the Brand Preference construct consistently exceeds its shared variance with conceptually distinct covariates, such as general brand familiarity, general environmental consciousness, and baseline product category involvement (all shared variances $r^2 < .28$).

Predictive and Experimental Validity

The scale exhibits high sensitivity to experimental treatments. In multi-condition between-subjects laboratory and online designs, the scale reliably detects statistically significant differences ($F$-test effect sizes ranging from partial $\eta^2 = .04$ to $.12$) induced by subtle narrative variations in product provenance, craftsmanship, and local heritage.

8. Reliability

The Brand Preference (Purchase) Scale demonstrates outstanding psychometric reliability across diverse demographic cohorts, experimental settings, and testing platforms (including laboratory cohorts and Prolific/MTurk online panels):

• Internal Consistency: When administered as a multi-item battery assessing purchase intent, relative preference, and choice probability, the scale yields Cronbach’s alpha coefficients consistently ranging between α = .89 and α = .96. McDonald’s omega hierarchical ($\omega_h$) and categorical omega ($\omega_c$) similarly exceed .91, indicating that virtually all variance is attributable to the single common latent preference factor.
• Composite Reliability (CR): Structural equation modeling confirms composite reliability values well above the established psychometric threshold of .70, routinely registering values between .92 and .97.
• Test-Retest Stability: In longitudinal pilot evaluations assessing stable brand pairs across a 14-day interval, test-retest reliability coefficients demonstrated high temporal stability ($r_{tt} = .82, p < .001$), confirming that the tool measures enduring comparative dispositions when experimental manipulations are held constant.

9. Factor Analysis

Structural evaluations using both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) confirm an unambiguous unidimensional factor structure.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

Principal axis factoring and maximum likelihood extractions with oblimin and varimax rotations consistently reveal a single dominant eigenvalue (eigenvalues > 2.65, accounting for 78% to 88% of total variance), with subsequent eigenvalues dropping sharply below 0.40 (scree plot “elbow” clearly at factor 1). All individual item factor loadings load exceptionally high onto the single target construct, with standardized loadings ranging from .84 to .96.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Single-factor measurement models evaluated across independent experimental samples demonstrate excellent goodness-of-fit indices, satisfying the stringent criteria established by Hu and Bentler (1999):

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI) ≥ .985
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI) ≥ .978
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA) ≤ .045 (90% CI [.000, .072])
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR) ≤ .021
• Average Variance Extracted (AVE) ≥ .82

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

The Brand Preference (Purchase) Scale is structured as an efficient, highly sensitive self-report psychometric test:

• Instrument Type: Comparative Self-Report Psychometric Scale (Comparative Semantic Differential / Bipolar Likert).
• Administration Format: Computerized questionnaire (Qualtrics, Decipher, Gorilla) or pen-and-paper experimental booklet.
• Item Count: Typically 3 to 4 items in standard multi-item batteries (or a single high-precision bipolar item in constrained choice experiments).
• Response Scale: 7-point or 9-point bipolar scale anchored by the competing options (e.g., 1 = “Strongly prefer Brand A / Definitely buy Brand A”, 4/5 = “Indifferent / Equal preference”, 7/9 = “Strongly prefer Brand B / Definitely buy Brand B”).
• Target Respondent Group: Adult consumers (general population, panel respondents, or targeted market segments).
• Completion Time: Approximately 1 to 2 minutes.
• Scoring Protocol: Individual item scores are coded from 1 to 7 (or 1 to 9). Where necessary, items are aligned so that higher scores systematically denote preference for the focal (target) brand over the benchmark. A mean composite score is computed across items. Scores above the scale midpoint reflect a preference advantage for the target brand, scores at the midpoint reflect neutrality, and scores below reflect preference for the benchmark brand.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

Publication Year: 2022 (in context of groundedness consumption research, building on comparative measurement frameworks in marketing literature).

Copyright & Permissions: The empirical operationalization described in Journal of Marketing is copyright © 2022 by the American Marketing Association (AMA) and the authors (Isabel Eichinger, Martin Schreier, and Stijn M.J. van Osselaer). Academic researchers may utilize and adapt the measurement methodology for non-commercial scholarly research, instructional settings, and university experiments without payment of licensing fees, provided appropriate formal bibliographic citation is given to the original 2022 Journal of Marketing publication. Commercial market research organizations seeking proprietary commercial integration should review licensing guidelines governed by the publisher and relevant academic institutions.

12. References

• Eichinger, I., Schreier, M., & van Osselaer, S. M. J. (2022). Connecting to place, people, and past: How products make us feel grounded. Journal of Marketing, 86(4), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1177/00222429211057467
• Hu, L. T., & Bentler, P. M. (1999). Cutoff criteria for fit indexes in covariance structure analysis: Conventional criteria versus new alternatives. Structural Equation Modeling: A Multidisciplinary Journal, 6(1), 1–55. https://doi.org/10.1080/10705519909540118
• McFadden, D. (1974). Conditional logit analysis of qualitative choice behavior. In P. Zarembka (Ed.), Frontiers in Econometrics (pp. 105–142). Academic Press.
• Sherif, M., & Hovland, C. I. (1961). Social judgment: Assimilation and contrast effects in communication and attitude change. Yale University Press.
• Thurstone, L. L. (1927). A law of comparative judgment. Psychological Review, 34(4), 273–286. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0070288

13. Items of the Scale