Customer-Based Brand Competitiveness Scale (CBBC)

1. Abstract

The Customer-Based Brand Competitiveness Scale (CBBC) is a psychometric instrument designed to capture consumers’ relative evaluations of how effectively a focal brand outperforms its direct competitors in the marketplace. Developed by Wangmo, Piehler, and Baumann (2025), the instrument addresses a critical theoretical and empirical gap in marketing and consumer psychology: while conventional customer-based brand equity (CBBE) measures predominantly evaluate brands in isolation (an absolute perspective), market competition inherently functions as a zero-sum, comparative decision environment. The CBBC scale conceptualizes brand competitiveness as a unidimensional, customer-evaluated relative construct consisting of seven operational items spanning perceived reputation, brand superiority, promise delivery, customer need fulfillment, comparative quality, market outperformance, and perceived market leadership.

The scale was developed and psychometrically validated across five diverse industry sectors in Australia—Fast-Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG), financial services, telecommunications, retail, and automotive. Following a rigorous three-stage scale development procedure encompassing qualitative consumer interviews, academic expert panel refinement, and three sequential quantitative studies, the instrument demonstrated exceptional psychometric integrity. Confirmatory factor analyses confirmed strict unidimensionality, yielding high internal consistency coefficients (Cronbach’s alpha and composite reliability consistently exceeding .90) and robust convergent, discriminant, and nomological validities. Administered on a 7-point Likert scale, the CBBC provides scholars and brand strategists with a parsimonious, diagnostically sensitive, and generalizable tool for assessing comparative brand strength, modeling competitive market dynamics, and predicting consumer choice behavior.

2. Keywords

Customer-based brand competitiveness, CBBC scale, relative brand equity, brand performance, comparative judgment, competitive advantage, psychometric validation, brand management, consumer psychology, market leadership

3. Authors

The Customer-Based Brand Competitiveness Scale was conceptualized, operationalized, and validated by an international team of marketing scholars and psychometric researchers specializing in brand strategy, consumer decision-making, and competitive positioning:

• Gedun Wangmo: Department of Marketing, Macquarie Business School, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. Her research focuses on brand competitiveness, consumer-based brand equity metrics, and relative consumer evaluations across service and product categories.
• Rico Piehler: University of Bremen, Faculty of Business Studies and Economics, Bremen, Germany. An authority in internal and external brand management, services marketing, and quantitative modeling of consumer brand perceptions.
• Chris Baumann: Macquarie Business School, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia; also affiliated with Seoul National University, South Korea. His work spans customer loyalty, brand performance, competitive benchmarking, and cross-national consumer behavior.

Correspondence regarding the scale’s empirical validation and structural parameters is documented in the seminal publication in the Journal of Product & Brand Management (Wangmo et al., 2025).

4. Purpose

In modern marketing literature and psychometric consumer research, the assessment of brand strength has long been dominated by Customer-Based Brand Equity (CBBE) models, such as those formulated by Aaker (1991) and Keller (1993). Although these legacy frameworks provide deep insight into cognitive associations, perceived quality, and brand resonance, they systematically suffer from an “absolute perspective” bias: consumers are typically asked to evaluate a target brand in a perceptual vacuum (e.g., “Brand X is reliable,” “Brand X is of high quality”). However, consumer decision-making in naturalistic market settings is fundamentally comparative. A consumer rarely decides whether a brand is good in isolation; rather, they evaluate whether Brand X is better than Brand Y or Brand Z at a given price point and usage context.

The primary purpose of the Customer-Based Brand Competitiveness (CBBC) Scale is to operationalize this long-neglected relative perspective. The CBBC scale provides a standardized, methodologically robust instrument that forces a direct, comparative cognitive appraisal between a focal brand and its relevant market competitors. By doing so, the scale accomplishes several clinical, empirical, and strategic objectives:

• Elimination of Ceiling and Halo Effects: Absolute brand scales frequently suffer from severe ceiling effects and positive halo biases, particularly when assessing iconic or ubiquitous market leaders. By anchoring every evaluation explicitly against competing alternatives, the CBBC forces respondents to calibrate their responses, generating higher variance and superior diagnostic accuracy.
• Strategic Market Diagnostics: For marketing practitioners, measuring absolute brand favorability does not necessarily translate into market share or brand resilience. A brand may achieve high absolute satisfaction scores while simultaneously hemorrhaging customers to an agile competitor offering superior relative utility. The CBBC directly captures this competitive differential.
• Theoretical Advancement in Nomological Modeling: In structural equation modeling (SEM) and behavioral experiments, the CBBC serves as a vital mediating or moderating construct bridging core brand perceptions (e.g., brand heritage, symbolic associations) and hard behavioral outcomes (e.g., wallet share allocation, switching resistance, brand advocacy, and actual purchase behaviors).
• Cross-Industry Benchmarking: The scale was deliberately constructed and validated across five distinct industrial verticals (FMCG, banking, telecommunications, retail, automotive), proving its operational flexibility across high-involvement, low-involvement, transactional, and relational consumer contexts.

5. Psychological Construct

The psychological construct measured by the CBBC scale is Customer-Based Brand Competitiveness. Conceptually, it is defined as a consumer’s holistic, cognitive-affective appraisal of a focal brand’s relative superiority and competitive market outperformance in relation to its salient category competitors. Although market competitiveness has traditionally been examined at the firm level using objective economic metrics—such as relative market share, return on assets (ROA), or cost structures—customer-based competitiveness captures the construct as it exists within consumer cognitive architecture.

Psychometrically, the CBBC is operationalized as a unidimensional construct. While competitive advantage manifests across multiple operational facets, consumer cognitive synthesis merges these components into an integrated, overarching appraisal of relative capability. The seven items of the CBBC capture seven essential facets of this unidimensional latent variable:

• Perceived Comparative Reputation: Evaluates the brand’s standing, institutional integrity, and public prestige directly contrasted against competing market alternatives. A superior reputation reduces cognitive perceived risk during comparative evaluation.
• General Perceived Superiority: Captures the global gestalt assessment of brand preeminence. It reflects the consumer’s high-level mental calculation that the focal brand transcends its competitive cohort in overall value delivery.
• Relative Promise Delivery (Expectation Fulfillment): Assesses brand integrity and psychological contract fulfillment. While many brands articulate compelling value propositions, this dimension reflects whether the focal brand actually executes on its promises better than alternative options.
• Comparative Customer Need Fulfillment: Measures functional, emotional, and social needs satisfaction relative to alternatives. A brand might satisfy needs adequately, but the CBBC identifies whether it tailors and personalizes this fulfillment more effectively than market rivals.
• Comparative Product/Service Quality: Captures the core performance specifications, durability, reliability, and service excellence of the focal brand benchmarked directly against competing product offerings.
• Market Outperformance: Evaluates the consumer’s perception of the brand’s operational vitality, innovation, and dynamic competitive winning within the marketplace.
• Perceived Market Leadership: Captures the category-defining status of the brand. Consumers associate market leadership with technological authority, trendsetting capability, and industry benchmarking.

Because the construct is unidimensional, these facets do not constitute distinct mathematical subscales; rather, they serve as mutually reinforcing, high-loading indicators of a singular latent trait: the focal brand’s customer-perceived competitive edge.

6. Theoretical Framework

The Customer-Based Brand Competitiveness Scale is grounded at the intersection of cognitive psychology, behavioral economics, and strategic brand management theories:

Thurstone’s Law of Comparative Judgment and Social Comparison Theory

At the psychological core of the CBBC is Thurstone’s (1927) Law of Comparative Judgment, which posits that the human cognitive system is fundamentally optimized for paired comparisons and relative discrimination rather than absolute magnitude estimation. When consumers encounter absolute scales, they mentally construct internal, often unmeasured reference points. Building on Festinger’s (1954) Social Comparison Theory and adaptation-level paradigms (Helson, 1964), the CBBC formalizes these reference points by setting the competitive field as the explicit anchor. Relative evaluations eliminate the cognitive ambiguity inherent in absolute semantic scales.

The Resource-Based View (RBV) and Dynamic Capabilities in Consumer Minds

From strategic management, the scale translates Barney’s (1991) Resource-Based View (RBV) and Porter’s (1985) Competitive Advantage framework into cognitive representations. In industrial organization and strategic management, competitive advantage exists when a firm implements a value-creating strategy not simultaneously being implemented by current or prospective rivals. The CBBC operationalizes this premise from the demand side: competitive advantage is meaningless unless it is perceived, decoded, and validated by the end customer.

Signaling Theory

Under Signaling Theory (Spence, 1973; Erdem & Swait, 1998), brand names act as market signals designed to reduce information asymmetry between buyers and sellers. When consumers evaluate dimensions like promise delivery and reputation relatively, they are weighing the credibility, clarity, and consistency of the focal brand’s signals against the competing noise of rival brands. The CBBC captures the net signal strength of the focal brand within a crowded information environment.

7. Validity

The psychometric validation of the CBBC scale followed the rigorous methodological guidelines outlined by Churchill (1979) and DeVellis (2016), utilizing a multi-stage empirical pipeline across multiple independent consumer cohorts:

Content and Face Validity

Item generation commenced with comprehensive qualitative consumer discovery (semi-structured in-depth interviews) exploring how everyday buyers define “competitiveness” and what leads them to categorize one brand as clearly superior to another. An initial pool of potential indicators was reviewed and refined by a panel of expert academic researchers in brand management and psychometrics. Items displaying semantic redundancy, double-barreled phrasing, or context-specific idiosyncrasies were systematically removed, yielding an initial candidate set for quantitative distillation.

Convergent Validity

Convergent validity was comprehensively established across all validation studies. Confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) revealed that all seven standardized factor loadings (λ) were exceptionally high and statistically significant at p < .001, consistently exceeding the conservative .70 benchmark (loadings ranged from .78 to .92 across distinct industry samples). Furthermore, the Average Variance Extracted (AVE) for the latent construct substantially surpassed the established .50 threshold, routinely recording values above .65 to .75 across the five industry datasets (FMCG, finance, telecommunications, retail, automotive), confirming that the construct explains the overwhelming majority of indicator variance.

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity was rigorously evaluated against related constructs, including overall customer satisfaction, absolute brand equity (CBBE), brand trust, and customer loyalty. The scale successfully passed both classical and cutting-edge criteria:

• Fornell-Larcker Criterion: The square root of the AVE for the CBBC scale was significantly greater than any bivariate correlation between the CBBC and other evaluated latent variables.
• Heterotrait-Monotrait Ratio (HTMT): All HTMT ratios between the CBBC and neighboring constructs fell comfortably below the conservative .85 threshold (and strictly below the liberal .90 ceiling), establishing that the CBBC measures a distinct, non-redundant psychological phenomenon.

Nomological and Predictive Validity

Nomological network testing confirmed strong, theoretically sound structural pathways. When modeled within structural equation models, the CBBC demonstrated robust predictive power regarding key consumer outcomes. Specifically, CBBC scores significantly and positively predicted:

• Consumer brand preference and share of wallet allocation.
• Brand advocacy and positive word-of-mouth (WOM) transmission.
• Consumer willingness to pay a price premium over competing market options.
• Resistance to competitive counter-persuasion and negative publicity.

8. Reliability

The Customer-Based Brand Competitiveness Scale displays world-class psychometric reliability across disparate market conditions, demographically diverse consumer groups, and product versus service industries.

Internal Consistency Reliability

Across the quantitative validation studies reported by Wangmo et al. (2025), internal consistency was examined using multiple complementary statistical metrics:

• Cronbach’s Alpha (α): The 7-item instrument achieved Cronbach’s alpha values consistently ranging between .92 and .96 across all five tested industries (FMCG, automotive, retail, financial services, and telecommunications). These values demonstrate exceptional internal homogeneity while remaining safely below extreme thresholds (> .98) that would imply excessive item duplication.
• Composite Reliability (CR): Accounting for varying factor loadings under congeneric measurement models, the Composite Reliability coefficients similarly exceeded .92 across all structural samples, confirming high operational precision.
• McDonald’s Omega (ω): When computed to account for potential tau-equivalence violations, McDonald’s hierarchical and total omega metrics also mirrored these elevated reliability coefficients (> .93).

Measurement Stability

Item-total correlations for all seven items routinely exceeded .75 across split-sample cross-validation procedures. Squared multiple correlations ($R^2$) for individual indicators indicated that between 60% and 85% of each item’s variance was directly accounted for by the underlying latent customer-based brand competitiveness factor, reflecting minimal measurement error and superior test-retest resilience across repeated cross-sectional implementations.

9. Factor Analysis

The underlying dimensionality of the CBBC was extensively investigated through both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) during its phased scale development.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

During initial quantitative testing, principal axis factoring with promax rotation was executed on candidate items. The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) measure of sampling adequacy consistently exceeded .92 (indicating marvelous data-to-factor suitability), and Bartlett’s Test of Sphericity was statistically significant ($p < .001$). Both scree plot inspection and parallel analysis unambiguously converged on a single-factor solution, with the primary factor accounting for over 65% to 73% of the total cumulative variance. No secondary factors achieved eigenvalues exceeding 1.0.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

To confirm this unidimensional structure, structural equation modeling with maximum likelihood estimation was conducted across independent cross-validation samples. The unidimensional 7-item model demonstrated outstanding fit to the empirical data across all industries, satisfying or surpassing the most stringent cutoff criteria recommended by Hu and Bentler (1999):

• Chi-Square / Degrees of Freedom Ratio ($\chi^2/df$): Values consistently maintained below 3.0 (and frequently below 2.0).
• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): Values consistently ranged between .975 and .994.
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): Values consistently ranged between .962 and .991.
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): Values maintained strictly between .035 and .058 (with 90% confidence intervals bounded well below .08).
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): Values ranged from .018 to .032.

Measurement Invariance

Multi-group CFA demonstrated configural, metric, and scalar invariance across product versus service categories and across consumer demographic strata (gender, age brackets). This confirms that observed score variations on the CBBC reflect true structural differences in perceived competitiveness rather than measurement artifact or semantic divergence across different customer segments.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

The operational specifications of the Customer-Based Brand Competitiveness Scale are structured as follows:

• Test Type: Psychometric rating scale / Self-report consumer evaluation instrument.
• Construct Assessed: Relative brand competitiveness (unidimensional).
• Target Population: Consumers, purchasers, B2B procurement decision-makers, and market observers familiar with a focal brand and its competitive category.
• Format: Written, digital, or mobile-administered survey questionnaire.
• Number of Items: 7 items.
• Response Format: 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).
• Estimated Administration Time: Approximately 60 to 90 seconds.
• Scoring Rules: All 7 items are positively keyed. There are no reverse-coded items. An overall Customer-Based Brand Competitiveness score is computed by calculating either the arithmetic mean (ranging from 1.0 to 7.0) or the sum score (ranging from 7 to 49) across all seven items. Higher scores denote superior customer-perceived relative brand competitiveness.
• Contextual Adaptation: The placeholder “[Brand X]” is substituted with the specific focal brand under evaluation. If desired, researchers may explicitly name the competitive benchmark group in the questionnaire preamble (e.g., “Compared to other major retail banks in Australia…”).

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Customer-Based Brand Competitiveness Scale was developed and published in 2025 by Gedun Wangmo, Rico Piehler, and Chris Baumann in the peer-reviewed scholarly outlet Journal of Product & Brand Management.

• Accessibility and Fees: The CBBC scale is an open-access psychometric instrument for non-commercial academic research, pedagogical use, and scholarly scientific investigations. No licensing fees or formal permissions are required for non-profit academic research, provided that proper bibliographic citation is attributed to the seminal work (Wangmo et al., 2025).
• Commercial and Enterprise Licensing: Commercial organizations, management consultancies, or market research agencies seeking to integrate the instrument into commercial proprietary diagnostics, syndicated benchmarking audits, or fee-for-service enterprise software platforms should review fair-use policies and may require formal permission in accordance with Emerald Publishing Group’s copyright policies.

12. References

The following foundational and empirical references underpin the design, validation, and theoretical modeling of the CBBC:

• Aaker, D. A. (1991). Managing brand equity: Capitalizing on the value of a brand name. The Free Press.
• Barney, J. (1991). Firm resources and sustained competitive advantage. Journal of Management, 17(1), 99–120. https://doi.org/10.1177/014920639101700108
• 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
• DeVellis, R. F. (2016). Scale development: Theory and applications (4th ed.). SAGE Publications.
• Erdem, T., & Swait, J. (1998). Brand equity as a signaling phenomenon. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 7(2), 131–157. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327663jcp0702_02
• Festinger, L. (1954). A theory of social comparison processes. Human Relations, 7(2), 117–140. https://doi.org/10.1177/001872675400700202
• Helson, H. (1964). Adaptation-level theory: An experimental and systematic approach to behavior. Harper & Row.
• 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
• Keller, K. L. (1993). Conceptualizing, measuring, and managing customer-based brand equity. Journal of Marketing, 57(1), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224299305700101
• Porter, M. E. (1985). Competitive advantage: Creating and sustaining superior performance. The Free Press.
• Spence, M. (1973). Job market signaling. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 87(3), 355–374. https://doi.org/10.2307/1882010
• Thurstone, L. L. (1927). A law of comparative judgment. Psychological Review, 34(4), 273–286. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0070288
• Wangmo, G., Piehler, R., & Baumann, C. (2025). Customer-based brand competitiveness (CBBC) scale: advancing the relative perspective. Journal of Product & Brand Management, 34(4), 450–467. https://doi.org/10.1108/JPBM-03-2024-5012

13. Items of the Scale