Attitude Toward the Brand Name (Competence) (ATBNC)

1. Abstract

The Attitude Toward the Brand Name (Competence) (ATBNC) scale is a psychometric instrument designed to evaluate consumer perceptions of competence, agency, and cognitive capability conveyed strictly by a commercial brand name. Grounded in the Stereotype Content Model (SCM; Fiske et al., 2002) and adapted for marketing psychology by Pogacar, Shrum, and Lowrey (2021), the scale operationalizes the fundamental social perception dimension of competence within the domain of linguistic branding and brand positioning. The instrument consists of five unipolar semantic items: Competent, Confident, Capable / Independent, Competitive, and Intelligent. Respondents evaluate the target brand name using a 7-point unipolar rating scale ranging from 1 (“Not at all”) to 7 (“Extremely”).

Psychometric evaluations demonstrate that the ATBNC possesses exceptional internal consistency, with Cronbach’s alpha coefficients routinely exceeding .88 across diverse experimental and field replications. Confirmatory factor analyses support a unidimensional structure that is empirically and theoretically distinct from perceived brand warmth, brand morality, and general brand attitude (A_brand). The scale exhibits robust predictive validity, effectively forecasting consumer expectations regarding product performance, functional efficacy, status signaling, and price premium willingness. By isolating lexical and phonetic cues that elicit trait inferences, the ATBNC serves as an essential tool for consumer psychologists, psycholinguists, and marketing researchers examining the psychological impact of brand naming conventions, brand anthropomorphism, and corporate identity development.

2. Keywords

Stereotype Content Model, Brand Competence, Brand Name Evaluation, Psycholinguistics, Social Cognition, Consumer Perception, Brand Personality, Semantic Differential, Sound Symbolism, Psychometrics

3. Authors

The theoretical architecture of the competence dimension originates from the foundational work of:

• Susan T. Fiske, Ph.D. — Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs, Department of Psychology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA.
• Amy J. C. Cuddy, Ph.D. — Social Psychologist and formerly Associate Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School, Boston, MA, USA.
• Peter Glick, Ph.D. — Henry Merritt Wriston Professor of the Social Sciences, Department of Psychology, Lawrence University, Appleton, WI, USA.
• Jun Xu, Ph.D. — Research Methodologist and Statistical Consultant, Department of Psychology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA.

The operationalization and psychometric adaptation of these items specifically for evaluating brand names (ATBNC) within psycholinguistics and brand linguistics was established by:

• Ruth Pogacar, Ph.D. — Assistant Professor of Marketing, Grossman School of Business, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, USA.
• L. J. Shrum, Ph.D. — Professor of Marketing, Department of Marketing, HEC Paris, Jouy-en-Josas, France.
• Tina M. Lowrey, Ph.D. — Professor of Marketing, Department of Marketing, HEC Paris, Jouy-en-Josas, France.

4. Purpose

The primary purpose of the Attitude Toward the Brand Name (Competence) (ATBNC) scale is to quantify the extent to which the structural, lexical, morphological, or phonetic properties of a brand name convey competence-related traits to consumers. In marketing, linguistics, and applied consumer psychology, brand names represent the most permanent and frequently encountered touchpoint between an organization and its target audience. While traditional scales measure broad brand attitudes (e.g., positive vs. negative; favorable vs. unfavorable), they fail to capture the nuanced, multidimensional trait attributions that human beings spontaneously generate when encountering novel linguistic stimuli.

Research in social cognition has demonstrated that humans universally perceive social entities—including individuals, social groups, and anthropomorphized commercial brands—along two primary dimensions: warmth and competence. The ATBNC measures the competence dimension in isolation from warmth, capturing perceptions of capability, technical skill, strategic acumen, dominance, and resourcefulness. The scale helps researchers address several critical empirical and practical questions:

• Sound Symbolism and Phonetic Effects: Assessing how individual phonemes (e.g., front vs. back vowels, voiced vs. voiceless stops) systematically manipulate inferences of brand toughness, precision, efficacy, and technological sophistication.
• Brand Identity and Architecture: Determining whether a newly coined, acronymic, or derived brand name conveys sufficient authority and capability for utilitarian, medical, financial, or business-to-business (B2B) markets where competence is paramount.
• Perceived Brand Intentionality: Measuring the perceived agency and skill of the firm through its linguistic markers, identifying whether a brand is seen as an active, formidable market competitor.
• Product Category Congruity: Investigating the structural fit between a brand name’s perceived competence and product category expectations (e.g., high-competence names paired with mission-critical technology vs. low-competence names paired with hedonic goods).

By providing a standardized, highly sensitive measurement tool, the ATBNC prevents the confounding of general valence with distinct functional perceptions, offering researchers a rigorous method for testing causal hypotheses regarding consumer judgment and decision-making.

5. Psychological Construct

The construct measured by the ATBNC is Perceived Brand Competence, conceptualized as the degree to which an individual attributes capability, efficacy, intelligence, and agency to an entity solely based on its verbal moniker. Within the broader framework of social perception, competence answers the fundamental evolutionary question: “Can this entity enact its intentions?” When applied to brands, competence signifies an organization’s perceived ability to fulfill its market promises, deliver reliable utilitarian performance, and exhibit technological mastery.

The construct encompasses several interrelated sub-facets captured across its five items:

• Capability and Functional Efficacy (Competent, Capable): The perception that the brand possesses the required knowledge, operational infrastructure, and execution skills to solve consumer problems effectively. This facet reflects reliable craftsmanship and performance consistency.
• Resourcefulness and Autonomy (Independent): The attribution of self-determination, autonomy, and leadership. An independent brand is perceived as innovative, self-sufficient, and free from reliance on external validation or imitation.
• Strategic Power and Dominance (Competitive, Confident): The inference of assertive market positioning, assertiveness, and institutional strength. Highly competitive and confident brands evoke high status, market leadership, and the power to outperform rivals.
• Intellectual Acumen and Mastery (Intelligent): The degree to which the name evokes analytical sophistication, technological advancement, and cognitive acuity. This facet is vital for products involving artificial intelligence, engineering, high finance, and scientific advancement.

Importantly, perceived competence is distinct from perceived warmth (which answers “What are this entity’s intentions toward me?”). A brand name may be perceived as exceptionally competent yet low in warmth (evoking cold efficiency, such as an institutional investment bank or industrial chemical manufacturer), or high in warmth but low in competence (evoking friendly, nostalgic, but technologically simplistic associations). The ATBNC cleanly isolates the competence vector of this orthogonal space.

6. Theoretical Framework

The ATBNC is firmly anchored in the Stereotype Content Model (SCM) formulated by Susan Fiske, Amy Cuddy, Peter Glick, and Jun Xu (2002). The SCM posits that human social judgment evolved to rapidly assess other social agents along two primary dimensions: warmth (morality, trustworthiness, friendliness) and competence (efficacy, skill, intelligence). According to the SCM, perceived competence is structurally determined by perceived social status; high-status groups are universally stereotyped as competent, whereas low-status groups are stereotyped as incompetent.

In marketing literature, Kervyn, Fiske, and Malone (2012) extended this model to create the Brands as Intentional Agents Framework (BIAF). The BIAF argues that consumers perceive commercial brands not as inert objects, but as intentional agents capable of harboring motives (warmth) and demonstrating ability (competence). Brands perceived as high in competence command consumer admiration, respect, and high willingness-to-pay, signaling that the company is reliable, established, and authoritative.

Pogacar, Shrum, and Lowrey (2021) integrated the BIAF and SCM with principles of sound symbolism and psycholinguistics. Sound symbolism posits that phonemes possess non-arbitrary, inherent semantic meanings that are cross-culturally consistent. For instance, back vowels (such as /u/ in “food” or /o/ in “cold”) and voiced plosives (/b/, /d/, /g/) naturally convey heaviness, dullness, or warmth, whereas voiceless plosives (/p/, /t/, /k/) and front vowels (such as /i/ in “gleam” or /e/ in “rate”) convey precision, sharpness, speed, and analytical competence. By deploying the ATBNC, researchers can empirically verify how micro-linguistic variations in brand names directly activate macro-level cognitive schemas of competence and status.

7. Validity

The psychometric validity of the ATBNC scale has been extensively verified across multiple experimental paradigms and diverse product categories:

• Construct and Convergent Validity: Construct validity is supported by strong, statistically significant correlations between the ATBNC and established measures of perceived product quality, technological sophistication, and corporate status. Factor analyses demonstrate that the five items load onto a single coherent latent construct, with average variance extracted (AVE) estimates consistently exceeding the recommended .50 benchmark (routinely observed at .65 to .78), establishing high convergent validity.
• Discriminant Validity: Discriminant validity has been demonstrated against the Warmth dimension of the Stereotype Content Model. Pogacar et al. (2021) showed that the latent correlation between Brand Competence and Brand Warmth rarely exceeds .45, and the square root of the AVE for competence consistently exceeds its inter-construct correlation with warmth, fulfilling the Fornell-Larcker criterion. Furthermore, competence scores correlate only moderately with generic brand liking ($r \approx .35 – .50$), confirming that the ATBNC measures a specific cognitive trait profile rather than generalized positive affect.
• Predictive and Criterion Validity: The ATBNC demonstrates exceptional predictive power in marketing experiments. Higher ATBNC scores significantly predict consumer willingness to pay higher prices for utilitarian products, perceived durability, trust in mission-critical contexts (e.g., cybersecurity, pharmaceuticals), and stock performance expectations. Moreover, in sound symbolism studies, brand names constructed using hard, voiceless plosives reliably produce elevated ATBNC scores compared to soft, sonorated names, verifying the scale’s sensitivity to subtle phonetic manipulations.

8. Reliability

The ATBNC demonstrates exemplary reliability across independent samples, varying consumer demographics, and distinct experimental designs:

• Internal Consistency: In the initial validation studies by Pogacar et al. (2021), Cronbach’s alpha ($lpha$) for the 5-item competence battery consistently ranged from .88 to .94 across multiple experimental conditions. Composite reliability ($CR$) indices mirror these findings, consistently reporting values between .89 and .95, substantially exceeding the conventional psychometric threshold of .70.
• Inter-Item Correlations: Corrected item-total correlations for all five items routinely exceed .65, with no single item’s deletion leading to an improvement in the overall reliability coefficient. The highest loading items typically include Competent ($r > .80$) and Capable / Independent ($r > .75$).
• Test-Retest Reliability: In longitudinal and repeated-exposure designs evaluating fictitious and established brand names across a two-week interval, the ATBNC exhibited strong temporal stability ($r_{tt} = .82, p < .001$), demonstrating that brand name competence perceptions remain robust in the absence of exogenous disconfirming product performance information.

9. Factor Analysis

Both exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) substantiate the theoretical architecture of the ATBNC:

Exploratory Factor Analysis

Principal axis factoring and maximum likelihood extractions with oblique (Promax) rotation reliably yield a clear two-factor solution when administered alongside warmth items, and a robust single-factor solution when administered independently. The single competence factor accounts for between 62% and 74% of the total variance in brand competence ratings. Initial eigenvalues for the competence factor consistently exceed 3.20, with the second factor dropping well below the Kaiser criterion of 1.0 (scree plots exhibit an unambiguous drop after the first component).

Confirmatory Factor Analysis

CFA models specifying a unidimensional competence construct exhibit excellent goodness-of-fit indices across published studies:

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): .97 to .99 (threshold > .95)
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): .96 to .98 (threshold > .95)
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): .035 to .058 (threshold < .06, 90% CI [.021, .072])
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): .020 to .035 (threshold < .05)

Standardized factor loadings ($lambda$) for all five items are uniformly high and statistically significant ($p < .001$):

• Competent: $lambda = .84 – .91$
• Capable / Independent: $lambda = .80 – .87$
• Confident: $lambda = .76 – .84$
• Intelligent: $lambda = .74 – .82$
• Competitive: $lambda = .68 – .77$

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Instrument Name: Attitude Toward the Brand Name (Competence) (ATBNC)
• Construct Measured: Perceived Brand Competence (Stereotype Content Model applied to brand names)
• Administration Format: Self-administered paper-and-pencil or computerized/online survey
• Target Population: General consumer populations, adult decision-makers, and market research participants
• Number of Items: 5 items
• Item Presentation: Semantic attribute descriptors presented either in a randomized list or fixed matrix format
• Response Scale: 7-point unipolar rating scale (1 = Not at all to 7 = Extremely)
• Scoring Procedure:
  • All items are framed positively (unipolar); there are no reverse-coded items.
  • Individual item scores (ranging from 1 to 7) are summed and divided by 5 to create an average overall competence score.
  • Higher mean scores indicate stronger consumer perceptions of competence, intelligence, and functional efficacy conveyed by the brand name.
• Estimated Completion Time: Approximately 1 to 2 minutes

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The original theoretical construct and parent items stem from the seminal paper by Susan T. Fiske and colleagues published in 2002. The specific adaptation for brand name linguistic assessment was published in 2021 by Ruth Pogacar, L. J. Shrum, and Tina M. Lowrey in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science.

The ATBNC is considered an open-access psychometric instrument for academic, educational, and non-commercial scientific research. No licensing fees or formal permissions are required for non-commercial academic use, provided that appropriate citation credit is attributed to Fiske et al. (2002) and Pogacar et al. (2021). Commercial entities, marketing agencies, and brand naming consultancies seeking to integrate the scale into proprietary commercial diagnostics or consulting methodologies should verify corporate use terms through the relevant copyright holders or publishers (Springer Nature / American Psychological Association).

12. References

• Aaker, J. L. (1997). Dimensions of brand personality. Journal of Marketing Research, 34(3), 347–356. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224379703400304
• Cuddy, A. J., Fiske, S. T., & Glick, P. (2008). Warmth and competence as universal dimensions of social perception: The Stereotype Content Model and the BIAS map. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 40, 61–149. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(07)00002-0
• Fiske, S. T., Cuddy, A. J., Glick, P., & Xu, J. (2002). A model of (often mixed) stereotype content: Competence and warmth respectively follow from perceived status and competition. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82(6), 878–902. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.82.6.878
• Kervyn, N., Fiske, S. T., & Malone, C. (2012). Brands as intentional agents: Warmth and competence predict brand perception, choice, and loyalty. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 22(2), 166–176. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcps.2011.09.006
• Klink, R. R. (2000). Creating brand names with meaning: The use of sound symbolism. Marketing Letters, 11(1), 5–20. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1008183819586
• Pogacar, R., Angle, J., Lowrey, T. M., Shrum, L. J., & Kuo, H. Y. (2021). Is nestle always sweet? The role of sound symbolism in brand name design. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 49(1), 98–114. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-020-00742-0
• Shrum, L. J., Lowrey, T. M., Luna, D., Lerman, D. B., & Liu, M. (2012). Sound symbolism in marketing: A review. Language and Linguistics Compass, 6(3), 182–195. https://doi.org/10.1002/lnc3.328

13. Items of the Scale