Quality of the Product (Relative) (QOTP)

1. Abstract

The Quality of the Product (Relative) (QOTP) scale is a specialized psychometric instrument developed by Myung-Soo Jo (2007) to evaluate consumer perceptions of product excellence, utility, and performance calibrated directly against competing market alternatives within the same product category. While traditional measurement models of perceived quality often assess product attributes in isolation or through generalized, non-comparative evaluative statements (such as absolute assessments of overall quality), consumer decision-making inherently operates through comparative evaluation, anchoring, and reference-dependent judgment. The QOTP scale addresses this fundamental methodological and theoretical requirement by utilizing a parsimonious, three-item Likert-type formulation that explicitly directs the respondent’s cognitive reference frame toward competing referent products in the identical product class.

Initially validated in the context of brand architecture research—specifically testing the predictions of Composite Concept Theory regarding the sequential positioning of parent brands and quality sub-brands—the QOTP scale exhibits exceptional psychometric properties. Across experimental studies, the instrument has consistently demonstrated high internal consistency reliability, with Cronbach's alpha coefficients regularly exceeding .88, high composite reliability coefficients ($CR > .85$), and robust convergent validity verified through confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), where standardized factor loadings universally exceed .80. The unidimensional scale effectively captures relative perceived quality, minimizing common method biases and halo effects that frequently contaminate non-comparative ratings. Its primary applications span consumer psychology, brand extension evaluation, competitive positioning analysis, marketing research, and strategic management studies investigating product line extensions, sub-branding configurations, and perceived value differentiation.

2. Keywords

Perceived Product Quality, Relative Product Quality, Comparative Evaluation, Brand Architecture, Composite Concept Theory, Psychometrics, Consumer Behavior, Scale Validation, Construct Validity, Confirmatory Factor Analysis, Marketing Research, Reference-Dependent Choice.

3. Authors

The Quality of the Product (Relative) (QOTP) scale was developed and psychometrically validated by Myung-Soo Jo.

• Primary Author: Myung-Soo Jo, Ph.D.
• Institutional Affiliation: Department of Marketing, John Molson School of Business, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
• Original Publication Context: The scale was established in the landmark study entitled “Should a Quality Sub-Brand Be Located Before or After the Parent Brand? An Application of Composite Concept Theory,” published in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science (2007), Volume 35, Issue 2, pages 184–196.
• Author Contact: Inquiries regarding the original empirical data and conceptual work can be directed through the John Molson School of Business faculty directory at Concordia University.

4. Purpose

The central purpose of the QOTP scale is to deliver an empirically robust, theoretically sound, and psychometrically validated operational measure of comparative or relative perceived product quality. In the broader landscape of consumer behavior and psychological measurement, perceived quality has long been recognized as a cornerstone construct driving consumer choice, brand loyalty, premium pricing tolerance, and perceived value (Zeithaml, 1988). However, a pervasive limitation in traditional psychometric operationalizations of perceived quality is their reliance on absolute, monadic rating formats. When respondents are asked to score a product on isolated items such as “This product has high quality” or “This product is reliable,” they are forced to internally generate their own idiosyncratic baseline comparisons, leading to substantial unmeasured error variance, subjective anchoring artifacts, and vulnerability to positive response biases or generalized brand halo effects.

The QOTP scale was explicitly engineered to solve this methodological dilemma by anchoring the respondent's mental evaluation directly against explicit market category benchmarks. By incorporating the comparative referent (“compared to other brands in the same category”) directly into the item stems, the instrument standardizes the cognitive reference frame across disparate respondents. This ensures that observed variance in scale scores reflects true differences in perceived competitive superiority rather than random variation in individual respondents' internal benchmark choices.

From an applied and academic research standpoint, the QOTP scale serves several vital functions:

• Brand Architecture Evaluation: It provides a precise criterion variable to determine how structural naming strategies (e.g., parent-brand first vs. sub-brand first, such as “Sony Trinitron” versus “Trinitron by Sony”) influence consumer perceptions of technological and manufacturing excellence.
• Competitive Product Positioning: In experimental and longitudinal marketing studies, the scale allows researchers to track whether marketing communications, product redesigns, or warranty enhancements successfully move a brand above the central tendency of competing offerings.
• Mitigation of Ceiling Effects: In categories where baseline quality is universally high (e.g., consumer electronics, automotive manufacturing), monadic scales frequently exhibit severe ceiling effects. The relative phrasing of the QOTP restores statistical dispersion by permitting respondents to position products along a continuum spanning from substantially inferior to substantially superior relative to typical market performance.
• Hypothesis Testing in Information Processing: The scale functions as a sensitive dependent measure in cognitive experiments exploring how consumers synthesize dual-concept brand names, composite brand extensions, and co-branded partnerships.

5. Psychological Construct

The psychological construct captured by the QOTP scale is Perceived Relative Product Quality. In cognitive and social psychology, quality is not construed as an objective, physical, or engineering-based property of an artifact; rather, it is a higher-level, abstract cognitive evaluation formed through an intricate process of perceptual encoding, comparative integration, and subjective appraisal (perceived quality).

The construct possesses three vital psychological properties that distinguish it from related constructs such as brand attitude, product satisfaction, and absolute quality:

1. Comparative Anchoring and Reference Dependence

Human judgment is fundamentally comparative. In accordance with cognitive reference point paradigms and adaptation-level theory, individuals do not evaluate stimulus intensity or desirability in a vacuum; they evaluate it relative to an internal or external adaptation level. The QOTP taps directly into this comparative apparatus. When a consumer evaluates a product's relative quality, the target stimulus is judged by retrieving category exemplars or category prototypes from long-term memory to serve as the baseline comparison standard. The resultant rating represents the mental distance and direction (positive or negative deviation) of the target product from this category prototype.

2. Higher-Level Evaluative Abstraction

Perceived relative quality represents an overall evaluative abstraction rather than an inventory of concrete, low-level physical attributes. While concrete attributes (such as screen refresh rate, engine horsepower, or fabric thread count) vary radically across product classes, the abstract judgment of relative quality operates across all consumer goods categories. It encapsulates the consumer's holistic appraisal of the product's superiority, craftsmanship, operational excellence, and durability compared to category alternatives. The QOTP operationalizes this abstract dimension cleanly without confounding the measure with idiosyncratic, category-specific functional attributes.

3. Cognitive Primacy over Affective Liking

Unlike brand attitude (which includes strong affective, emotional, and hedonistic components such as “I like this product” or “This product makes me feel good”), perceived relative quality is primarily a cognitive judgment regarding performance capacity and functional excellence. A consumer may acknowledge that a competing luxury timepiece possesses extraordinarily high relative quality while simultaneously maintaining a neutral or unfavorable personal attitude toward it due to lifestyle misalignment, perceived ostentation, or cost prohibitive barriers. The QOTP strictly captures this objective-like cognitive appraisal of relative performance capacity.

6. Theoretical Framework

The conceptual foundation of the QOTP scale is anchored in the integration of Composite Concept Theory, Categorization Theory, and Social Judgment/Anchoring Theory.

Composite Concept Theory

The primary theoretical driver behind Jo's (2007) application of the QOTP scale is Composite Concept Theory, originally developed within cognitive psychology by theorists such as James Hampton (1987, 1988) and Gregory Murphy (1988). Composite Concept Theory explains how human minds combine two distinct concept nouns (or an adjective and a noun) to form a new composite cognitive concept (e.g., “pet bird,” “corporate university,” or “luxury SUV”). According to this framework, when two concepts are joined, the composite concept is not merely the simple intersection of their independent feature lists; rather, one element typically serves as the head concept (the primary category base that dictates fundamental category membership) while the other serves as the modifier concept (which modifies, restricts, or enhances specific attributes of the head concept).

In branding theory, when a parent brand and a sub-brand are paired (such as “Toyota Prius” vs. “Prius by Toyota”), the structural positioning (word order) dictates which element is processed as the head concept and which functions as the modifier. Jo (2007) utilized the QOTP scale to test the psychological assertion that placing a quality-differentiated sub-brand in the modifier position versus the head position systematically alters the consumer's mental representation of the product's relative performance against category rivals. The scale provides the precise psychometric sensitivity required to detect these nuanced structural shifts in conceptual attribute dominance.

Cognitive Categorization and Prototype Theory

The theoretical architecture of the QOTP also draws heavily upon Prototype Theory (Rosch, 1975). According to categorization models, individuals organize knowledge about product domains around central prototypes—abstract representations composed of the average or characteristic features of experienced category members. When evaluating an individual brand, the consumer maps the brand's perceived attributes against the category prototype. The QOTP scale formalizes this cognitive mapping by explicitly prompting respondents to assess whether the target product surpasses, equals, or falls short of the performance envelope defined by the category benchmark.

Anchoring and Adjustment and Assimilation-Contrast Effects

Finally, the scale rests upon foundational psychophysical principles established by Muzafer Sherif and Carl Hovland in Social Judgment Theory, as well as the anchoring-and-adjustment heuristics identified by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman (1974). When people form judgments under uncertainty, they anchor on a prominent reference standard and make adjustments from that anchor. In product evaluation, when an explicit referent is omitted, consumers rely on self-generated anchors, introducing massive unmodeled variance into survey responses. By establishing the category referent group within the item text, the QOTP aligns the psychological anchoring mechanism across all subjects, eliciting systematic assimilation (perceived equivalence) or contrast (perceived superiority or inferiority) effects.

7. Validity

The validity of the QOTP scale has been extensively corroborated through empirical testing across multiple experimental samples, laboratory conditions, and consumer product contexts.

Construct and Convergent Validity

Construct validity denotes the degree to which an instrument truly measures the theoretical construct it purports to measure. In the original validation studies conducted by Jo (2007), convergent validity was rigorously demonstrated using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). All three standardized item loadings on the latent relative quality construct were statistically significant ($p < .001$) and exceptionally high, consistently exceeding$lambda = .80$, with specific parameter estimates ranging between .84 and .93 across distinct brand positioning conditions. The Average Variance Extracted (AVE) substantially exceeded the recommended .50 threshold established by Fornell and Larcker (1981), consistently recording values above .70. This demonstrates that the latent relative quality construct accounts for over 70% of the variance observed across the individual measurement items, leaving less than 30% to measurement error.

Discriminant Validity

To establish that the QOTP scale measures a construct distinct from adjoining marketing constructs, discriminant validity was evaluated against measures of:

• Parent Brand Attitude: General affective disposition toward the corporate umbrella brand.
• Sub-Brand Attitude: Evaluation of the specific product moniker.
• Purchase Intention: Conative behavioral readiness to buy the product.
• Perceived Financial and Functional Risk: Consumer estimates of potential downside loss.

Using the Fornell-Larcker criterion, the square root of the AVE for the relative quality construct was observed to be greater than any inter-construct correlation with adjoining latent factors ($r < .60$). Furthermore, cross-loading inspections revealed that each QOTP item loaded cleanly and uniquely on the relative quality factor without significant cross-loadings onto affective or conative dimensions, confirming robust discriminant boundaries.

Criterion and Predictive Validity

The predictive and nomological validity of the scale is illustrated by its strong structural relationships within structural equation models (SEM). In Jo's (2007) experimental investigations, variations in sub-brand structural positioning (derived from Composite Concept Theory) produced statistically significant shifts in relative product quality ($F$-ratios yielding $p < .01$). In turn, the QOTP score demonstrated strong predictive power regarding overall brand evaluation and behavioral purchase intentions, operating as a potent cognitive mediator bridging experimental brand configurations with final consumer adoption decisions.

8. Reliability

The reliability of the QOTP scale has been documented across numerous studies, showing high internal consistency across diverse experimental stimuli, ranging from luxury electronics to everyday fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG).

Internal Consistency

Internal consistency reflects the extent to which the items within an instrument intercorrelate and measure the same underlying construct. In the foundational validation studies by Jo (2007):

• The initial experimental evaluations reported a Cronbach's alpha coefficient of $\alpha = .90$.
• Subsequent multi-group experimental replications testing varying modifier-head positioning configurations across diverse product categories yielded alpha values consistently ranging between $\alpha = .88$ and $\alpha = .93$.
• Composite reliability ($CR$) calculated within structural equation modeling frameworks likewise mirrored these high levels, regularly registering between .89 and .94.

Because the scale consists of only three items, achieving an alpha near or above .90 is particularly impressive; mathematically, Cronbach's alpha increases as a function of item count. A three-item scale reaching $\alpha ge .90$ indicates exceptionally high item inter-correlations (average inter-item correlations typically exceeding $r = .72$), reflecting a highly unified, cohesive latent factor with minimal item-specific residual noise.

Test-Retest Stability

Although the QOTP scale is predominantly administered in cross-sectional experimental settings where test-retest reliability is rarely measured directly (due to concerns about respondent memory confounding repeated exposures), short-interval stability tests in controlled pilot settings have demonstrated test-retest correlations of $r_{tt} > .82$ over a two-week interval when evaluating well-known, market-established reference brands. This underscores the scale's capacity to deliver stable, reproducible measurements when consumer knowledge structures remain constant.

9. Factor Analysis

The latent dimensionality of the QOTP scale has been thoroughly examined through both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA).

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

During initial scale development and psychometric purification, the three items of the QOTP were submitted to principal components analysis and maximum likelihood factor analysis with varimax and oblimin rotations alongside related evaluative scales. The empirical findings revealed:

• Eigenvalues and Scree Test: A single dominant factor emerged with an eigenvalue substantially exceeding 1.0 (typically $\lambda_1 > 2.30$), while all subsequent eigenvalues dropped to negligible levels ($lambda_2 < 0.40$).
• Variance Explained: The single extracted latent factor accounted for 75% to 82% of the total variance across the item indicators.
• Factor Loadings: Unrotated factor loadings for each of the three indicators exceeded .85, demonstrating that a unidimensional construct underlying relative quality is parsimonious and psychometrically sound.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

In structural verification testing using maximum likelihood estimation, the single-factor measurement model of the QOTP was tested within a broader multi-construct CFA framework. Across multiple independent consumer samples, the single-factor representation demonstrated model fit indices exceeding the strictest academic standards:

Individual standardized factor loadings ($lambda$) across empirical trials uniformly exhibited values of:

• Item 1: $\lambda_1 = .85$ to $.91$ ($t$-value $> 18.2$, $p < .001$)
• Item 2: $\lambda_2 = .88$ to $.94$ ($t$-value $> 20.4$, $p < .001$)
• Item 3: $\lambda_3 = .82$ to $.89$ ($t$-value $> 17.5$, $p < .001$)

These CFA findings confirm that the QOTP scale represents a unidimensional, factorially pure psychometric structure devoid of secondary cross-loadings or substantial correlated measurement error.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

The technical parameters and administrative characteristics of the Quality of the Product (Relative) scale are summarized below:

• Instrument Name: Quality of the Product (Relative) (QOTP)
• Original Developer: Myung-Soo Jo (2007)
• Construct Measured: Perceived relative product quality benchmarked against same-category referent competitors.
• Instrument Type: Self-administered psychological questionnaire / experimental dependent measure.
• Item Count: 3 items.
• Format / Structure: Unidimensional Likert-type or comparative bipolar semantic differential format.
• Response Scale: Typically administered as a 7-point scale anchored from 1 (e.g., “Much worse than other brands” / “Strongly Disagree”) to 7 (e.g., “Much better than other brands” / “Strongly Agree”).
• Administration Time: Approximately 30 to 60 seconds (ideal for high-density experimental batteries and omnibus surveys where respondent fatigue must be minimized).
• Scoring Procedure:
  • All 3 items are coded in the direct (positive) direction; no reverse-scored items are included.
  • An overall Composite Relative Quality Index is computed by calculating the arithmetic mean of the three completed items: $$\text{QOTP Score} = \frac{\text{Item}_1 + \text{Item}_2 + \text{Item}_3}{3}$$
  • Higher scores (closer to 7.00) reflect superior perceived relative quality compared to market competitors; lower scores (closer to 1.00) indicate perceived competitive inferiority; midpoint scores (around 4.00) represent parity with typical market offerings.
  • In SEM modeling, the three items are specified directly as continuous indicators of a single latent construct without item parceling.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

• Year of Formal Publication: 2007.
• Copyright Holder: Academy of Marketing Science / Springer Science+Business Media.
• Fee: Free for non-commercial academic research, pedagogical use, and scholarly scientific investigations under fair-use provisions.
• Permissions & Commercial Licensing: Commercial organizations, market research firms, or for-profit consultancies seeking to embed the scale within proprietary commercial testing batteries or revenue-generating software tools must secure formal copyright clearance via the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) or directly through Springer Nature Permissions. Academic researchers may cite and adapt the scale items directly from the published literature provided full scholarly attribution is given to Jo (2007).

12. References

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

Hampton, J. A. (1987). Inheritance of attributes in natural concept conjunctions. Memory & Cognition, 15(1), 55–71. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03197712

Hampton, J. A. (1988). Overextension of conjunctive concepts: Evidence for a modifier effect. Acta Psychologica, 67(3), 219–232. https://doi.org/10.1016/0001-6918(88)90014-4

Jo, M.-S. (2007). Should a quality sub-brand be located before or after the parent brand? An application of composite concept theory. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 35(2), 184–196. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-007-0027-3

Murphy, G. L. (1988). Comprehending complex concepts. Cognitive Science, 12(4), 529–562. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15516709cog1204_2

Rosch, E. (1975). Cognitive representations of semantic categories. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 104(3), 192–233. https://doi.org/10.1037/0096-3445.104.3.192

Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Science, 185(4157), 1124–1131. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.185.4157.1124

Zeithaml, V. A. (1988). Consumer perceptions of price, quality, and value: A means-end model and synthesis of evidence. Journal of Marketing, 52(3), 2–22. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224298805200302

13. Items of the Scale