Congruence (Self with Message) (CSMG)

Abstract

The Congruence (Self with Message) (CSMG) scale is a psychometric instrument designed to evaluate the psychological and symbolic alignment between an individual’s identity and specific communicative content or digital marketing messages. Originating from research on digital place branding and consumer psychology by Styvén, Mariani, and Strandberg (2020), the CSMG scale operationalizes the degree to which an audience member perceives a message as reflective of their actual, ideal, or social self-concept. The instrument consists of five items evaluated on a 7-point Likert response format ranging from 1 (“Strongly disagree”) to 7 (“Strongly agree”). Designed with an adaptable bracketed content placeholder (e.g., “[content]”), the instrument functions as a versatile measurement tool across varied communicative channels, including destination marketing campaigns, branded social media posts, political communication, and influencer messaging. Psychometric evaluations confirm a robust unidimensional factor structure with high internal consistency (Cronbach’s α typically exceeding .90, composite reliability > .90), excellent convergent validity (average variance extracted > .65), and strong discriminant validity against adjacent psychological constructs such as message involvement, narrative engagement, and general attitude toward the advertisement. By quantifying how effectively mediated content functions as a vehicle for symbolic self-expression, identity communication, and self-presentation, the CSMG scale serves as a vital tool for empirical researchers and strategic communicators examining the psychological mechanisms that drive social transmission, online engagement, and consumer-brand relationship formation.

Keywords

Congruence (Self with Message), CSMG, self-congruity theory, self-presentation, digital place branding, identity expression, symbolic communication, social sharing, psychometrics, consumer-message alignment, narrative identification, social media psychology.

Authors

The Congruence (Self with Message) scale was operationalized and published by an interdisciplinary team of researchers in consumer behavior, digital marketing, and management:

• Maria Ek Styvén – Professor of Industrial Marketing at Luleå University of Technology, Department of Social Sciences, Technology and Arts, Luleå, Sweden. Her research focuses on consumer behavior, digital marketing, place branding, and tourist decision-making processes.
• Marcello M. Mariani – Professor of Management and Marketing at Henley Business School, University of Reading, United Kingdom, and the University of Bologna, Italy. His scholarship encompasses digital business, big data analytics, artificial intelligence, consumer engagement, and tourism management.
• Christina Strandberg – Researcher in Industrial Marketing at Luleå University of Technology, Sweden. Her academic work investigates digital communications, social media interactions, place marketing, and identity construction.

Purpose

The fundamental purpose of the CSMG scale is to capture the psychological intersection between mediated content and an individual’s self-definition. In modern communicative environments—particularly within algorithmic social media platforms and digital branding ecosystems—content consumption is no longer a passive, unidirectional reception of informational cues. Rather, communication constitutes a transactional process of identity signaling, self-concept validation, and public self-presentation. Individuals actively curate, share, endorse, and internalize content that mirrors their personal values, lifestyle aspirations, and social identities.

Traditional measures of advertising effectiveness often emphasize cognitive appraisals (e.g., informational utility, argument quality, clarity) or basic affective responses (e.g., ad liking, valence, arousal). Although these metrics are informative, they frequently fail to explain why consumers exhibit profound psychological attachment to certain messages or why they willingly share specific promotional content across their personal networks. The CSMG scale addresses this empirical gap by quantifying message-induced self-congruence—the extent to which an individual views a message as an authentic extension of their persona.

In applied research settings, the CSMG scale operates as a critical predictor of behavioral outcomes, including viral social sharing, electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM), brand advocacy, and destination visitation intention. Within digital place branding, for instance, a promotional video or social media campaign depicting a geographic region must resonate with how potential visitors or residents see themselves. When high self-message congruence occurs, the communicative material functions as a symbolic resource, enabling users to assert their identity by affiliating with the message. In academic empirical investigations, the scale serves as a powerful mediator or moderator, elucidating the psychological bridge linking message design elements (such as visual narrative styles, tonal qualities, and brand personality) with terminal consumer actions.

Psychological Construct

The psychological construct assessed by the CSMG scale is self-message congruence, which denotes an individual’s subjective appraisal of the overlap between their self-concept and the symbolic meaning embedded within a specific communicative artifact. The construct is rooted in multidimensional self-concept theory, integrating both internal psychological resonance and external communicative signaling.

1. Symbolic Identity Expression

Identity expression reflects the subjective realization that a message provides a linguistic, visual, or conceptual canvas through which an individual can articulate who they are. Mediated artifacts possess symbolic properties; when consumers encounter content that mirrors their central beliefs, hobbies, cultural affiliations, or moral commitments, the message becomes an externalized vehicle for self-expression. For instance, an environmentalist encountering content that documents regenerative ecological practices recognizes the material not merely as news, but as a symbolic manifestation of their own environmental ethos.

2. Desired Self-Presentation

Self-presentation involves the intentional regulation of identity markers to cultivate a specific impression in social interactions. Modern consumers routinely manage their digital reputations by strategically selecting content that reflects their aspirational or social self-concept. The CSMG scale captures this behavioral anticipation by measuring whether content matches how the user wishes to appear to peers, family, colleagues, or digital audiences. This facet taps into the impression-management motivation that governs social media behavior, distinguishing between private self-identification and social display value.

3. Personal Identification

Personal identification represents the cognitive and affective absorption of message cues into the individual’s self-schema. It evaluates the immediate phenomenological experience of looking at, reading, or hearing a message and concluding, “This represents me.” Unlike broad cognitive agreement or ideological alignment, personal identification requires an affective resonance wherein the consumer blurs the boundary between the message protagonist or narrative theme and their individual lived experience.

4. Social Signaling and Public Meaning

This dimension addresses the communicative utility of the message when transferred into a social context. Messages possess currency in interpersonal communication; transmitting a message informs recipients about the sender’s tastes, intellectual stance, humor, socio-political orientation, or cultural sophistication. The CSMG scale evaluates whether the respondent perceives the message as carrying an overt social code that effectively communicates their core attributes to external observers.

5. Self-Reflective Resonance

Self-reflective resonance is the profound evaluative realization that a piece of content summarizes substantial truths regarding one’s personal character. It extends beyond superficial aesthetic preference, probing deep characterological alignment. When content “says a lot about me as a person,” it touches upon enduring values, core life philosophies, and foundational components of the self, converting mundane media interaction into an experience of existential and psychological validation.

Theoretical Framework

The conceptual architecture of the CSMG scale rests upon three intersecting theoretical paradigms in psychology and consumer research:

Self-Congruity Theory

Originally formulated by Sirgy (1982), Self-Congruity Theory posits that consumer behavior is partially determined by the cognitive comparison between an individual’s self-concept and the stereotypical image of a product, brand, or environment. Sirgy delineated four distinct dimensions of the self-concept: the actual self (how a person perceives themselves), the ideal self (how a person would like to perceive themselves), the social self (how a person believes they are perceived by others), and the ideal social self (how a person desires to be perceived by others). While self-congruity was historically applied to tangible products (e.g., luxury automobiles, retail stores), Styvén et al. (2020) adapted these foundational assumptions to mediated communications. In this conceptualization, the “message” contains symbolic personality attributes; when consumers observe a congruence between these message traits and their multi-faceted self-concept, positive psychological outcomes and behavioral compliance naturally ensue.

Impression Management and Dramaturgical Sociology

The scale integrates Erving Goffman’s (1959) seminal framework of dramaturgical analysis and self-presentation. Goffman asserted that individuals continuously engage in “performances” within social environments to control the impressions formed by others. In contemporary hyper-connected digital contexts, social media platforms function as contemporary stages where the individual curates digital props to construct an idealized facade. By sharing or endorsing digital communications, consumers select pre-fabricated narrative materials that convey prestige, intelligence, humor, or moral rectitude. The CSMG scale explicitly measures this impression-management dynamic, particularly through items addressing how content matches the respondent’s preferred self-presentation style.

The Extended Self in the Digital Age

Russell Belk’s (1988) seminal formulation of the Extended Self argued that individuals regard possessions as integral components of their identities. In his updated formulation for the digital era, Belk (2013) demonstrated that non-material digital artifacts—such as status updates, shared links, digital photographs, and media messages—function as contemporary digital extensions of identity. Consumers incorporate digital media into their self-construct through processes of selection, customization, and public dissemination. The CSMG operationalizes the specific boundary condition under which a message transitions from an external stimulus into an active, functional component of the extended digital self.

Validity

Empirical assessment of the CSMG scale across various marketing and digital communications environments demonstrates excellent psychometric validity across multiple evaluative dimensions:

Construct and Convergent Validity

Construct validity was formally established by Styvén, Mariani, and Strandberg (2020) during their empirical investigation of place branding across digital media environments involving 648 respondents. In standard Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) models, all five items exhibited high, statistically significant standardized factor loadings (λ), consistently exceeding the recommended .70 threshold (loadings ranged from .82 to .91, all p < .001). The Average Variance Extracted (AVE) for the single-factor construct surpassed .70, well above the .50 cutoff recommended by Fornell and Larcker (1981), indicating that the latent construct explains more than 70% of the variance observed among its constitutive indicators.

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity confirms that the CSMG scale assesses a distinct psychological phenomenon rather than duplicating general evaluative or affective reactions. Styvén et al. (2020) evaluated discriminant validity using the Fornell-Larcker criterion and the Heterotrait-Monotrait (HTMT) ratio of correlations. The square root of the AVE for self-message congruence was markedly higher than its bivariate correlations with related constructs, including:

• Message Involvement: While involvement measures cognitive absorption and perceived personal relevance, CSMG uniquely captures symbolic identity reflection.
• Attitude toward the Content: Liking or approving of a message does not necessitate that the message reflects one’s personal character. The correlation between general attitude and CSMG remained below .65, satisfying standard distinctiveness cutoffs.
• Digital Media Skills: Technical capability to interact with media was shown to be empirically distinct from the psychological identification felt toward specific message content.

Furthermore, all calculated HTMT ratios fell below the conservative .85 threshold, corroborating rigorous discriminant boundaries between self-message congruence and peripheral communication constructs.

Predictive and Nomological Validity

Nomological validity is substantiated by the scale’s strong performance within structural equation models examining downstream behavioral intentions. Research demonstrates that CSMG significantly predicts:

• Willingness to share content across social media channels (path coefficients typically ranging between β = .40 and β = .65, p < .001).
• Positive electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) propagation.
• Favorable brand or destination brand attitudes.
• Conative behavioral intentions, such as intent to visit an advertised location or purchase an identity-aligned product.

These findings verify that when content aligns closely with an individual’s self-presentation goals, the psychological impetus to broadcast that content dramatically increases, affirming the predictive utility of the instrument.

Reliability

The CSMG scale demonstrates exceptional internal consistency across heterogeneous samples and varied experimental conditions. In the foundational validation study by Styvén, Mariani, and Strandberg (2020), the scale yielded an internal consistency coefficient (Cronbach’s α) of .93, demonstrating high internal reliability. Composite Reliability (CR) values across structural models were equally high, registering at .93 to .94, substantially higher than the conventional psychometric threshold of .70.

Subsequent replications across diverse stimulus materials (e.g., sustainable lifestyle campaigns, cross-cultural tourism media, luxury brand advertisements) have consistently yielded Cronbach’s α coefficients between .89 and .95. Item-total correlations across the five indicators reliably exceed .75, indicating that all five statements contribute harmoniously to the latent variable without evidence of redundant item phrasing. Because the instrument uses a compact 5-item architecture, it minimizes participant fatigue while maintaining adequate bandwidth-fidelity balance, avoiding both the vulnerability of 2-item measures and the artificial consistency inflation observed in excessively lengthy scales.

Factor Analysis

The factorial validity of the CSMG scale has been verified through both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA), confirming a robust unidimensional structure:

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

In initial scale piloting using Principal Axis Factoring and Maximum Likelihood extraction with Promax rotation, the five items consistently load onto a single dominant factor possessing an eigenvalue substantially exceeding Kaiser’s criterion of 1.0 (typical initial eigenvalues > 3.80). The primary factor explains between 72% and 81% of the total variance across observed indicators. The scree plot displays an unambiguous elbow immediately following the first factor, confirming the absence of secondary or residual factors.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Structural equation modeling and CFA conducted via maximum likelihood estimation reveal superior model fit for the one-factor model without the inclusion of correlated error terms. Representative goodness-of-fit indices reported across empirical applications include:

• Chi-Square / Degree of Freedom Ratio (χ²/df): 1.84 to 2.45 (well below the conservative 3.0 threshold).
• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): .985 to .996 (exceeding the standard .95 benchmark).
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): .978 to .992 (indicating exceptional baseline comparison fit).
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): .038 to .052 (90% CI [.019, .068], satisfying the < .06 standard for close fit).
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): .018 to .027 (substantially lower than the .08 threshold).

The standardized factor loadings for individual items from representative structural models are presented in Table 1:

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The Congruence (Self with Message) scale is structured as follows:

• Construct Measured: Self-Message Congruence / Identity Alignment with Mediated Communication.
• Instrument Type: Self-report psychometric questionnaire.
• Target Respondent: General adult consumers, media audiences, social media users, and digital content recipients.
• Number of Items: 5 items.
• Dimensionality: Unidimensional (single latent factor).
• 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).
• Administration Time: Approximately 1 to 2 minutes.
• Content Adaptability: The term “[content]” is designed to be substituted by the investigator with specific media identifiers such as “video,” “article,” “Instagram post,” “advertisement,” “campaign,” or “photograph.”
• Scoring Protocol: No reverse-scored items. A composite self-congruence index is calculated by computing the unweighted arithmetic mean across the five items (yielding a scale score ranging from 1.0 to 7.0) or by calculating the sum score (ranging from 5 to 35). Higher scores denote greater alignment between personal identity and message content.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Congruence (Self with Message) scale was introduced by Maria Ek Styvén, Marcello M. Mariani, and Christina Strandberg in their 2020 article published in the Journal of Business Research. The instrument is accessible without monetary fee for academic, scholarly, and non-commercial scientific research, subject to standard professional attribution conventions. Researchers utilizing or adapting the CSMG scale are expected to formally cite the original 2020 validation article. Commercial applications, commercial software integration, or proprietary market research deployments may require direct formal permissions from the authors or the journal’s copyright licensing holders (Elsevier B.V.).

References

• Belk, R. W. (1988). Possessions and the extended self. Journal of Consumer Research, 15(2), 139–168. https://doi.org/10.1086/209154
• Belk, R. W. (2013). Extended self in a digital world. Journal of Consumer Research, 40(3), 477–500. https://doi.org/10.1086/671052
• 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
• Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Anchor Books.
• Sirgy, M. J. (1982). Self-concept in consumer behavior: A critical review. Journal of Consumer Research, 9(3), 287–300. https://doi.org/10.1086/208924
• Styvén, M. E., Mariani, M., & Strandberg, C. (2020). Online place branding: Do digital media skills matter? Journal of Business Research, 119, 540–550. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2020.07.031

Items of the Scale