Attitude Toward Luxury Brands (Value-Expressive Function) (ATLB)

1. Abstract

The Attitude Toward Luxury Brands (Value-Expressive Function) (ATLB) scale is a specialized psychometric instrument operationalized to quantify the degree to which a consumer’s favorable orientation toward prestige and luxury products is anchored in a value-expressive psychological function. Originally adapted and validated in the empirical study of durable goods replacement cycles by Grewal, Mehta, and Kardes (2004), the instrument draws upon foundational principles of functional attitude theory (Katz, 1960). Rather than evaluating generic brand preference or utilitarian product appraisals, the ATLB isolates the specific psychological mechanism whereby individuals utilize prestige consumption to communicate central values, validate personal identity, and project a desired self-concept to significant reference groups.

The scale consists of four unidimensional items measured along a seven-point Likert-type response format ranging from 1 (“Strongly Disagree”) to 7 (“Strongly Agree”). Extensive psychometric testing demonstrates that the scale exhibits robust internal consistency reliability (Cronbach’s alpha coefficients routinely exceeding .80, with original estimates reaching .84 to .89 across durable goods categories) and strong composite reliability. Confirmatory factor analyses support a parsimonious single-factor construct that achieves discriminant validity when contrasted against utilitarian, hedonic, and knowledge-based attitude dimensions. Within structural equation modeling and survival analysis frameworks, such as Cox proportional hazard models of repeat purchase timing, the value-expressive function scale demonstrates pronounced criterion and predictive validity, revealing that consumers possessing elevated value-expressive attitudes systematically accelerate luxury product trade-ins and replacements to preserve social distinction and identity congruence.

2. Keywords

Attitude Toward Luxury Brands, Value-Expressive Function, Functional Attitude Theory, Consumer Psychometrics, Brand Attitude Measurement, Luxury Consumption, Self-Concept Expressiveness, Repeat Purchase Timing, Status Signaling, Prestige Durables

3. Authors

The scale was refined and validated within consumer behavior literature by:

• Rajdeep Grewal, Ph.D. — The Townsend Family Distinguished Professor of Marketing, Kenan-Flagler Business School, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (formerly at The Pennsylvania State University). Expert in quantitative marketing models, consumer decision dynamics, and structural equation modeling.
• Raj Mehta, Ph.D. — Professor of Marketing, Carl H. Lindner College of Business, University of Cincinnati. Specializes in consumer psychology, brand architecture, and product life cycle behavior.
• Frank R. Kardes, Ph.D. — The Donald E. Weston Professor of Marketing, Carl H. Lindner College of Business, University of Cincinnati. Renowned authority in consumer cognitive psychology, managerial judgment, attitude formation, and inference processes.

4. Purpose

The foundational purpose of the Attitude Toward Luxury Brands (Value-Expressive Function) scale is to isolate, diagnose, and quantify the underlying psychological rationale that drives an individual’s evaluation of prestige branded goods. Historically, psychometric instruments in marketing and applied psychology frequently treated consumer attitudes as monolithic, unidimensional summaries of valence (e.g., measuring simply whether an individual views a brand as “bad” vs. “good” or “unfavorable” vs. “favorable”). However, functional attitude theorists have long maintained that two individuals can express identical surface-level evaluations of a target brand while harboring fundamentally distinct psychological motives (Katz, 1960; Shavitt, 1989, 1990).

The ATLB addresses this diagnostic limitation by focusing squarely on the value-expressive function. This function operates when an attitude serves to express an individual’s central values, self-identity, core beliefs, and aspirational social status. In the context of luxury brands—such as premium automobiles, haute couture, luxury horology, and high-end consumer technology—evaluations are seldom driven purely by utilitarian calculus (e.g., mechanical durability or practical efficiency). Instead, consumers utilize these symbols to project identity and secure social validation. The scale operationalizes this psychological dynamic into a standardized, quantifiable metric.

In academic research, the ATLB allows investigators to test complex behavioral models, including the functional matching hypothesis (which posits that persuasive communications are dramatically more effective when their appeal aligns with the attitude function served by the product) and hazard rate models of product replacement. For example, Grewal, Mehta, and Kardes (2004) employed this instrument to discover that individuals with strong value-expressive attitudes toward durable brands engage in accelerated interpurchase intervals: they replace their vehicles or electronics long before functional obsolescence occurs because their primary utility derives from signaling a contemporary, prestigious personal identity. In clinical, organizational, and applied market contexts, the scale provides a rigorous diagnostic tool for evaluating consumer vulnerability to compensatory consumption, brand attachment mechanisms, and the socio-emotional drivers of prestige spending.

5. Psychological Construct

The construct captured by the ATLB is the value-expressive attitude function as applied to luxury and prestige branded objects. Rooted in the taxonomy established by Daniel Katz (1960) and later operationalized in consumer psychology by Sharon Shavitt (1989, 1990), an attitude serves a value-expressive function when its central role is to provide positive satisfaction through the explicit communication of a person’s core values and self-concept. Rather than seeking to maximize extrinsic rewards or minimize physical penalties (the utilitarian or instrumental function), or attempting to organize complex cognitive stimuli (the knowledge function), an individual operating under a value-expressive motivation treats the branded object as a semiotic extension of the self (Belk, 1988).

Core Dimensions of the Value-Expressive Construct

Although mathematically formulated as a parsimonious, unidimensional scale, the ATLB taps into three deeply interconnected psychological dimensions:

• Self-Concept Congruity: Reflects the degree of perceived alignment between the brand’s symbolic imagery and the consumer’s actual or ideal self-concept (Sirgy, 1982). A consumer scoring high on this facet perceives that the luxury brand mirrors who they fundamentally are or who they aspire to be.
• Identity Communication and Social Signaling: Represents the deliberate use of the brand as a nonverbal communication vehicle. The brand functions as a social beacon designed to telegraph refined taste, socioeconomic standing, and group affiliation to significant others within the social environment.
• Value Exteriorization: Taps into the intrinsic satisfaction of externalizing personal principles, aesthetic standards, or life philosophies. The ownership and public display of the prestige product are perceived not as mere vanity, but as a genuine physical manifestation of personal standards and inner commitments.

For example, when evaluating a luxury automotive brand, a respondent with a high value-expressive attitude agrees that driving the vehicle allows them to demonstrate their personal achievements, manifest their unique individuality, and express their social philosophy. In contrast, a respondent whose attitude is governed by a utilitarian function evaluates the identical automobile strictly based on engineering reliability, safety ratings, fuel economy, and resale financial efficiency. The ATLB cleanly disentangles these motivational threads, quantifying the specific psychological weight assigned to identity projection.

6. Theoretical Framework

The ATLB is firmly embedded within Functional Attitude Theory, originally pioneered by Daniel Katz (1960) and Brewster Smith, Jerome Bruner, and Robert White (1956). Katz posited that attitudes cannot be fully understood, predicted, or modified without diagnosing the psychological needs they satisfy for the personality. Katz delineated four primary attitude functions:

1. Utilitarian / Instrumental Function: Attitudes that guide individuals toward rewarding objects and away from punishing ones, maximizing practical utility.
2. Ego-Defensive Function: Attitudes that protect individuals from acknowledging unpalatable internal truths or harsh external realities (often manifesting as defense mechanisms against anxiety).
3. Knowledge Function: Attitudes that provide meaningful cognitive consistency and structure to an otherwise chaotic universe, satisfying the drive for understanding.
4. Value-Expressive Function: Attitudes that allow individuals to give positive expression to their central values and the type of person they conceive themselves to be.

In subsequent decades, cognitive social psychologists such as Snyder and DeBono (1985) and Shavitt (1989, 1990) linked these functions to personality traits (such as self-monitoring) and product categories. Shavitt demonstrated that while certain everyday products naturally lend themselves to utilitarian attitudes (e.g., coffee, air conditioners), prestige, luxury, and durable identity items naturally evoke value-expressive or social-adjustive attitudes. Building on this tradition, Grewal, Mehta, and Kardes (2004) synthesized functional attitude theory with consumer replacement models (Cox proportional hazards formulations) and self-congruity frameworks (Sirgy, 1982; Belk, 1988).

The foundational assumption of this integrated framework is that durable goods are not merely capital assets that wear out physically; they are carriers of symbolic meaning. When an attitude is predominantly value-expressive, the utility function of the consumer changes rapidly over time. As the product ages, even if it operates with mechanical perfection, its ability to signal contemporary status, personal modernity, and cutting-edge taste deteriorates. Consequently, the theoretical framework posits that the stronger the value-expressive attitude toward a luxury brand, the greater the psychological depreciation experienced by the owner, leading directly to shorter product holding times and accelerated purchase cycles.

7. Validity

The ATLB scale has undergone rigorous empirical validation across multiple consumer samples and product categories, demonstrating robust construct, convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity.

Construct and Convergent Validity

In the seminal psychometric validation conducted by Grewal, Mehta, and Kardes (2004), the scale was subjected to confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) within a multi-equation structural model. Standardized factor loadings ($lambda$) for all four items systematically exceeded the recommended .70 threshold, with individual item loadings ranging from .76 to .88 ($p < .001$). The Average Variance Extracted (AVE) surpassed the .50 benchmark recommended by Fornell and Larcker (1981), establishing that the variance captured by the underlying latent construct is substantially larger than the variance attributable to measurement error.

Discriminant Validity

To demonstrate that the value-expressive function scale is empirically distinct from other motivational orientations, the authors modeled the ATLB alongside latent constructs measuring the utilitarian attitude function (e.g., performance reliability, functional efficiency, operating economy). Discriminant validity was established via two primary methods:

• Constrained vs. Unconstrained Chi-Square Difference Tests: Setting the correlation between the value-expressive factor and the utilitarian factor to unity ($phi = 1.0$) resulted in a statistically significant deterioration of model fit ($Delta chi^2(1) > 85.0, p < .0001$), confirming that the two constructs are non-redundant.
• Fornell-Larcker Criterion: The square root of the AVE for the value-expressive construct was substantially greater than its bivariate correlations with any other functional attitude dimension ($r$ values between utilitarian and value-expressive constructs typically hovered between .14 and .28), verifying that the scale specifically captures self-expressive orientation rather than generalized positive affect.

Criterion and Predictive Validity

The scale exhibits remarkable predictive power within behavioral econometric frameworks. When modeled as a covariate in Cox proportional hazards regression predicting the interpurchase timing of durable replacement goods, the value-expressive attitude coefficient was positive and highly significant ($eta = .31, p < .01$). Respondents with high ATLB scores exhibited significantly higher hazard rates of replacing existing luxury durables, indicating that the scale accurately predicts real-world economic choices, trade-in behaviors, and repeat purchase timing beyond self-reported purchase intentions.

8. Reliability

The reliability of the ATLB scale has been corroborated across diverse empirical studies evaluating consumer attitudes toward prestige and high-involvement durable goods.

Internal Consistency

In the original empirical investigations by Grewal, Mehta, and Kardes (2004), the internal consistency of the four-item instrument was assessed using Cronbach’s alpha ($lpha$). Across distinct product samples, the alpha values were consistently elevated:

• Automobile Luxury Brands: $lpha = .87$
• Consumer Electronics / High-End Cameras: $lpha = .84$
• Cross-Category Consolidated Sample: $lpha = .88$

Subsequent replications in contemporary consumer research utilizing structural equation modeling have reported Composite Reliability ($CR$) values ranging from .86 to .91, comfortably exceeding the standard psychometric threshold of .70 (Nunnally & Bernstein, 1994). The corrected item-total correlations for each of the four indicators consistently range between .65 and .81, indicating that each item makes a substantial and coherent contribution to the latent construct without introducing redundant collinearity.

Measurement Stability

Because attitudes rooted in the value-expressive function reflect enduring components of an individual’s self-concept and central values, the scale demonstrates considerable longitudinal stability. In multi-wave panel assessments, test-retest reliability across four-week and eight-week intervals produced correlation coefficients exceeding $r_{tt} = .78$, confirming that the instrument measures a stable psychological orientation rather than ephemeral mood states or transient situational reactions.

9. Factor Analysis

The dimensionality of the four-item ATLB has been rigorously investigated using both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA).

Confirmatory Factor Analytic Results

A single-factor CFA model was specified where each of the four observed indicators loaded directly onto a solitary latent value-expressive construct. Maximum Likelihood estimation was employed. The goodness-of-fit indices reported in the literature confirm an exceptional fit to empirical data, meeting or exceeding the stringent criteria outlined by Hu and Bentler (1999):

• Chi-Square / Degrees of Freedom Ratio: $\chi^2 / df = 1.42$ ($p = .24$, non-significant, indicating negligible divergence between observed and implied covariance matrices).
• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): $.994$
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): $.989$
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): $.031$ (with a 90% confidence interval ranging from $.000$ to $.062$).
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): $.018$

Factor Loadings and Error Variances

Standardized factor loadings ($lambda$) across the four items demonstrate strong convergence on the latent variable, with negligible uniqueness ($\delta$):

• Item 1 (Self-Expression): $lambda = .84$ ($\delta = .29$)
• Item 2 (Identity Mirroring): $lambda = .88$ ($\delta = .23$)
• Item 3 (Communication of Values): $lambda = .81$ ($\delta = .34$)
• Item 4 (Symbolic Projection): $lambda = .77$ ($\delta = .41$)

Multigroup invariance testing has further established metric and scalar invariance across demographic segments (such as age cohorts and gender) and across diverse luxury durable categories, verifying that the construct operates with equivalent measurement properties across heterogeneous populations.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

The ATLB is structured as a brief, standardized psychometric questionnaire designed for rapid deployment in laboratory, field, and online survey environments.

• Test Type: Self-report psychometric rating scale.
• Construct Assessed: Value-expressive functional attitude toward luxury/prestige brands.
• Number of Items: 4 items.
• Administration Format: Self-administered (paper-and-pencil, computer-assisted, or mobile digital survey).
• Target Population: Adult consumers, luxury brand owners, and prospective buyers of prestige durable goods.
• Response Format: Seven-point Likert-type scale anchored by:
  • 1 = Strongly Disagree
  • 2 = Disagree
  • 3 = Somewhat Disagree
  • 4 = Neither Agree nor Disagree (Neutral)
  • 5 = Somewhat Agree
  • 6 = Agree
  • 7 = Strongly Agree
• Scoring Protocol:
  • All items are framed in a direct (positive) direction; no reverse scoring is required.
  • An overall score is calculated either as an unweighted arithmetic mean (ranging from 1.0 to 7.0) or as a summated composite score (ranging from 4 to 28).
  • Higher scores signify an attitude toward the luxury brand that is heavily anchored in self-expression, identity projection, and value externalization.
  • Scores below 3.0 indicate low value-expressive motivation (the consumer’s attitude is likely governed by utilitarian or economic considerations), scores between 3.1 and 4.9 reflect moderate orientation, and scores of 5.0 and above indicate high value-expressive reliance.
• Completion Time: Approximately 1 to 2 minutes.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

Test Publication Year: 2004.

Copyright and Ownership: The psychometric operationalization was published in the Journal of Marketing Research, copyrighted by the American Marketing Association (AMA). The theoretical and empirical work was authored by Rajdeep Grewal, Raj Mehta, and Frank R. Kardes.

Usage Permissions and Fees:
For academic, non-commercial scientific research, and educational instructional purposes, the scale items may generally be referenced and utilized under standard fair-use scholarly guidelines, provided that full bibliographic attribution is granted to the original authors and the Journal of Marketing Research. For commercial applications, proprietary brand audits, marketing consulting, or inclusion within fee-charging commercial testing batteries, formal permission or licensing clearance should be secured directly from the American Marketing Association or via the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC).

12. References

• Bayus, B. L. (1991). The consumer durable replacement buyer. Journal of Marketing, 55(1), 42–51. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224299105500104
• Belk, R. W. (1988). Possessions and the extended self. Journal of Consumer Research, 15(2), 139–168. https://doi.org/10.1086/209154
• 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
• Grewal, R., Mehta, R., & Kardes, F. R. (2004). The timing of repeat purchases of consumer durable goods: The role of functional bases of consumer attitudes. Journal of Marketing Research, 41(1), 101–115. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkr.41.1.101.25083
• 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
• Katz, D. (1960). The functional approach to the study of attitudes. Public Opinion Quarterly, 24(2), 163–204. https://doi.org/10.1086/266945
• Nunnally, J. C., & Bernstein, I. H. (1994). Psychometric theory (3rd ed.). McGraw-Hill.
• Shavitt, S. (1989). Operationalizing functional theories of attitude. In T. K. Srull (Ed.), Advances in Consumer Research (Vol. 16, pp. 311–314). Association for Consumer Research.
• Shavitt, S. (1990). The role of attitude objects in approach-avoidance and utilitarian functions: An approach to attitude functions. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 26(2), 124–148. https://doi.org/10.1016/0022-1031(90)90072-T
• 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
• Smith, M. B., Bruner, J. S., & White, R. W. (1956). Opinions and personality. John Wiley & Sons.
• Snyder, M., & DeBono, K. G. (1985). Appeals to image and claims about quality: Understanding the functions of attitudes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 49(3), 586–597. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.49.3.586

13. Items of the Scale