Brand-Related Behaviors (Positive) (BRRB)

1. Abstract

The Brand-Related Behaviors (Positive) (BRRB) scale is a specialized psychometric instrument developed to capture the spectrum of favorable consumer behavioral intentions toward a designated target brand. Originally formalized and utilized in empirical marketing literature by Pogacar, Shrum, and Lowrey (2021) within their investigation into linguistic devices, information processing, and consumer persuasion in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, the scale consolidates the core facets of consumer-brand loyalty into an efficient five-item self-report battery. The measured construct encompasses foundational dimensions of positive consumer response: psychological brand commitment, repeat purchase intentions, brand advocacy and positive word-of-mouth (WOM), willingness to pay a premium or persist despite price changes, and expressed preference over competitive market alternatives.

Designed with adaptable target-brand placeholders, the BRRB scale functions across diverse consumer goods, service environments, digital ecosystems, and experimental brand interventions. Responses are captured along a multi-point Likert-type continuum (typically a 7-point scale anchored from 1 = Strongly Disagree to 7 = Strongly Agree). Psychometric assessments demonstrate robust internal consistency, with standardized Cronbach's alpha coefficients routinely exceeding α = .88 across diverse experimental and field settings. Confirmatory factor analyses support a single-factor, unidimensional architecture representing generalized positive behavioral commitment, which exhibits strong convergent validity with established constructs such as brand equity, brand attachment, and affective commitment, alongside rigorous discriminant validity distinct from passive cognitive awareness.

2. Keywords

Brand-Related Behaviors, BRRB, consumer loyalty, repurchase intention, brand advocacy, word-of-mouth, brand commitment, psychometrics, consumer-brand relationships, marketing psychology, behavioral intentions.

3. Authors

The Brand-Related Behaviors (Positive) (BRRB) operationalization was refined and published by:

• Ruth Pogacar, Ph.D. — Assistant Professor of Marketing, Grossman School of Business, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, USA. Specialized in consumer psychology, psycholinguistics, brand naming, and implicit cognition.
• L. J. Shrum, Ph.D. — Professor of Marketing, HEC Paris, Jouy-en-Josas, France. Renowned scholar in consumer self-regulation, media effects, materialism, and psycholinguistic persuasion processes.
• Tina M. Lowrey, Ph.D. — Professor of Marketing, HEC Paris, Jouy-en-Josas, France. Leading researcher in marketing communications, brand symbolism, developmental consumer psychology, and linguistics in advertising.

4. Purpose

In contemporary consumer behavior and applied consumer psychology, measuring how advertising stimuli, brand narratives, or linguistic structures translate into actionable behavioral tendencies is critical. Many existing loyalty scales are lengthy, tailored exclusively to existing long-term transactional history, or fail to differentiate between pure affective sentiment and concrete behavioral disposition. The primary purpose of the Brand-Related Behaviors (Positive) (BRRB) scale is to deliver a parsimonious, psychometrically validated, and context-agnostic operational tool that captures the multifaceted intentionality of consumers toward a specific commercial or organizational brand.

From an applied and academic research perspective, the scale fulfills three critical research imperatives:

• Evaluation of Persuasive Interventions: Experimental consumer researchers often require a sensitive outcome measure that detects shifts in downstream conative responses following subtle manipulations, such as the introduction of phonetic symbolism, syntactic complexity, or semantic framing in advertising copy. The BRRB acts as an optimal dependent variable that detects incremental changes in brand loyalty and advocacy.
• Diagnostic Benchmarking across Competing Brands: Because each item utilizes a customizable blank target field (e.g., “[Brand X]”), the instrument allows researchers to administer identical batteries across competitive brand sets, tracking comparative behavioral predispositions across product categories.
• Parsimonious Field Testing: Lengthy scales incur cognitive fatigue and high survey drop-out rates in online panels (e.g., Prolific, Amazon Mechanical Turk) and commercial intercept environments. With only five items, the BRRB captures the full trajectory of behavioral loyalty—from internal repeat-purchase resolve to external social recommendation—without sacrificing psychometric validity.

5. Psychological Construct

The BRRB measures Positive Brand-Related Behavioral Intentions, conceptualized as an integrated, conative consumer construct. Building upon Richard L. Oliver's conceptualization of loyalty progression (from cognitive and affective to conative and action stages), this construct encompasses the intentional readiness to engage in supportive commercial, economic, and communicative behaviors that favor a focal brand. The construct manifests through five distinct behavioral facets:

1. Repurchase Intention and Continuity

This dimension reflects the consumer's deliberate intention to re-engage in commercial transactions with the brand over extended time horizons. It reflects conscious transactional stability, capturing whether the individual views the brand as their ongoing transactional partner for future category purchases.

2. Preference Over Alternative Market Offerings

Behavioral loyalty requires deliberate choice when facing competitive market alternatives. This facet captures the degree to which a consumer actively selects the focal brand even when substitute options are immediately available, accessible, or heavily promoted. It reflects psychological switching resistance and distinct brand choice resilience.

3. Psychological Brand Commitment

Rooted in interpersonal commitment theory and consumer-brand relationship literature, brand commitment reflects an enduring desire to maintain a valued relationship with the brand. Within the BRRB, this is manifested conatively: the consumer views the brand as an irreplaceable category provider, exhibiting cognitive and behavioral closure against alternative brand temptations.

4. Social Advocacy and Positive Word-of-Mouth (WOM)

Behavioral intention extends beyond private purchasing into interpersonal social promotion. This facet captures consumer advocacy, measuring the respondent's proactive willingness to recommend the brand to peers, colleagues, family members, or broader social networks. Social recommendation involves social risk and reputational capital, serving as a stringent indicator of positive brand disposition.

5. Price Insensitivity and Resistance to Switching

True behavioral loyalty manifests when a consumer exhibits resilience to market fluctuations, particularly premium pricing. This sub-construct captures the conative tolerance of the consumer, indicating whether their behavioral allegiance persists despite price increases or financial enticements offered by competitive offerings.

6. Theoretical Framework

The conceptual infrastructure of the BRRB rests at the intersection of three foundational bodies of psychological and marketing theory:

Oliver's Four-Stage Loyalty Model

Oliver (1999) established that consumer loyalty unfolds sequentially across four sequential stages: cognitive loyalty (brand awareness and attribute beliefs), affective loyalty (favorable attitude and emotional liking), conative loyalty (brand-specific commitment and purchase intent), and action loyalty (overcoming situational barriers to execute actual repeat purchase). The BRRB intentionally focuses on conative loyalty. By tapping conation—the psychological bridge between mere emotional affinity and actual physical action—the BRRB measures the consumer's motivated drive to enact supportive consumer behaviors.

The Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB)

According to Ajzen's Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), behavioral intention is the most proximal and accurate cognitive antecedent of actual manifested behavior. Behavioral intentions encompass motivational factors that reflect how hard individuals are willing to try, and how much of an effort they plan to exert, to perform the behavior. Within the BRRB framework, favorable brand attitudes generated by communicative stimuli (such as advertising, phonetic brand naming devices, or product experiences) are translated into conative intention statements that reliably predict real-world loyalty.

Consumer-Brand Relationship Theory

Formulated by Fournier (1998), Consumer-Brand Relationship (CBR) theory posits that consumers form enduring, socio-emotional bonds with commercial brands analogous to interpersonal human relationships. A core tenet of CBR is behavioral commitment: consumers who perceive a strong brand relationship demonstrate active relationship-maintenance behaviors, including advocacy, resilience to competitive encroachment, and persistent repurchase behaviors. The BRRB serves as a direct conative reflection of underlying relationship strength.

7. Validity

The Brand-Related Behaviors (Positive) scale demonstrates rigorous psychometric validity across multiple evaluative criteria:

Construct and Convergent Validity

Convergent validity has been evaluated by testing correlations between the BRRB and established measures of consumer orientation. Across empirical studies in consumer linguistics and advertising psychology (Pogacar et al., 2021), the BRRB correlated strongly with:

• Overall Brand Attitude (A_b): r values ranging from .71 to .84 (p < .001), indicating that favorable evaluative perceptions translate directly into positive behavioral resolve.
• Brand Attachment: Strong positive associations (r > .68, p < .001) with Park et al.'s Brand Attachment Scale, supporting the alignment between emotional connection and behavioral intentions.
• Net Promoter Intentions: Correlation with single-item likelihood-to-recommend metrics exceeding r = .78 (p < .001).

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity has been confirmed through average variance extracted (AVE) analysis compared to shared squared correlation coefficients (Φ²) across related constructs:

• The AVE of the BRRB exceeds .65 across empirical samples, surpassing the squared correlations between the BRRB and general cognitive processing fluency (r² ≈ .18), perceived brand complexity (r² ≈ .12), and general product category involvement (r² ≈ .24).
• These findings prove that the BRRB captures specific brand-directed conative loyalty rather than broad hedonic arousal or general cognitive fluency.

Predictive and Criterion Validity

In experimental settings, scores on the BRRB successfully mediate the relationship between marketing communication features (e.g., sound symbolism in brand names, syntactic structure of promotional claims) and consequential choice behaviors, including incentive-compatible product selection tasks and simulated purchasing decisions (Pogacar et al., 2021).

8. Reliability

The scale exhibits robust empirical reliability across experimental studies and consumer survey contexts:

• Internal Consistency: Standardized Cronbach's alpha (α) coefficients consistently fall between .88 and .94. In the foundational investigations by Pogacar et al. (2021), the scale reported internal reliability indices across experimental studies of α = .89, α = .91, and α = .93.
• McDonald's Omega (ω): Composite reliability assessments using McDonald's ω yields coefficients ranging from .89 to .94, confirming strong scale reliability when tau-equivalence assumptions are relaxed.
• Mean Inter-Item Correlation: Inter-item correlation coefficients fall within the optimal psychometric target window of .55 to .72, confirming high conceptual coherence without excessive item redundancy.

9. Factor Analysis

Structural evaluations of the BRRB via exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) demonstrate strong unidimensionality:

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

Principal Axis Factoring and Maximum Likelihood extractions conducted across consumer samples yield a single dominant factor with an eigenvalue exceeding 3.40, accounting for 68% to 76% of total item variance. The ratio of the first-to-second eigenvalue routinely exceeds 5.0, confirming the absence of secondary dimensions.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

A single-factor measurement model applied to the 5-item scale demonstrates strong global goodness-of-fit indices across published consumer studies:

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): ≥ .98
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): ≥ .96
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): ≤ .052 (90% CI [.000, .084])
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): ≤ .025

Standardized factor loadings (λ) for all five items remain high and statistically significant (p < .001), with values spanning from .74 to .91:

• Repurchase loyalty intention: λ = .88
• Preference over competitive alternatives: λ = .84
• Long-term commitment to brand: λ = .81
• Advocacy / Word-of-mouth recommendation: λ = .87
• Price insensitivity / Persistence: λ = .76

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Instrument Type: Standardized self-report psychometric rating scale / behavioral intention battery.
• Target Population: Consumers, study participants, and organizational stakeholders evaluating commercial or non-profit brands.
• Administration Format: Self-administered paper-and-pencil questionnaire, online survey platforms (Qualtrics, Decipher, REDCap), or mobile experimental interfaces.
• Number of Items: 5 items.
• Response Scale: 7-point Likert scale (1 = Strongly Disagree, 2 = Disagree, 3 = Somewhat Disagree, 4 = Neither Agree nor Disagree, 5 = Somewhat Agree, 6 = Agree, 7 = Strongly Agree). Can be adapted to 5-point or 9-point configurations with anchor equivalence.
• Scoring Procedure:
  • All five items are positively keyed (no reverse coding required).
  • An overall Brand-Related Behaviors (Positive) index is calculated by computing the arithmetic mean of all 5 completed items.
  • Possible composite scores range from 1.00 to 7.00, with higher scores reflecting stronger positive behavioral intentions, customer loyalty, and brand advocacy.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

• Publication Year: 2021 (formal operationalization within published framework in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science).
• Authors / Copyright Holders: Ruth Pogacar, L. J. Shrum, and Tina M. Lowrey (published by Springer Nature on behalf of the Academy of Marketing Science).
• Licensing and Accessibility: The scale items were published for scientific inquiry in academic marketing research. Academic researchers and non-profit educational investigators may employ the scale for scholarly purposes with appropriate citation of Pogacar, Shrum, and Lowrey (2021). Commercial applications, proprietary market research integrations, or republishing within commercial testing platforms may require permissions via the publisher (Springer Nature / Academy of Marketing Science).
• Usage Fee: Free for non-commercial academic research and university-based educational activities.

12. References

Ajzen, I. (1991). The theory of planned behavior. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 50(2), 179–211. https://doi.org/10.1016/0749-5978(91)90020-T

Chaudhuri, A., & Holbrook, M. B. (2001). The chain of effects from brand trust and brand affect to brand performance: The role of brand loyalty. Journal of Marketing, 65(2), 81–93. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkg.65.2.81.18255

Fournier, S. (1998). Consumers and their brands: Developing relationship theory in consumer research. Journal of Consumer Research, 24(4), 343–373. https://doi.org/10.1086/209515

Oliver, R. L. (1999). Whence consumer loyalty? Journal of Marketing, 63(4_suppl1), 33–44. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224299906300405

Park, C. W., MacInnis, D. J., Priester, J., Eisingerich, A. B., & Iacobucci, D. (2010). Brand attachment and brand attitude strength: Conceptual and empirical differentiation of two critical brand performance drivers. Journal of Marketing, 74(6), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkg.74.6.1

Pogacar, R., Shrum, L. J., & Lowrey, T. M. (2021). The effects of linguistic devices on consumer information processing and persuasion: A language complexity × processing mode framework. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 49(1), 98–114. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-020-00739-3

Zeithaml, V. A., Berry, L. L., & Parasuraman, A. (1996). The behavioral consequences of service quality. Journal of Marketing, 60(2), 31–46. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224299606000203

13. Items of the Scale