Attitude Toward the Brand (Trustworthiness) (ATTB)

1. Abstract

The Attitude Toward the Brand (Trustworthiness) (ATTB) scale, conceptualized and validated within the seminal signaling framework of Erdem and Swait (1998), is an established psychometric instrument designed to measure consumer perceptions of brand credibility, with specific operational emphasis on the trustworthiness dimension. Rooted in information economics and market signaling theory, the scale captures the degree to which consumers perceive a brand as possessing the sustained willingness and moral integrity to consistently execute its market claims and fulfill its explicit and implicit promises over time. Operating across high-involvement and low-involvement product categories, the instrument isolates the psychological confidence consumers deposit into brand signals under conditions of imperfect information and consumer risk. Psychometrically, the trustworthiness construct is evaluated through multi-item Likert-type indicators—typically operationalized across a 7-point continuum—measuring dimensions of perceived honesty, dependability, promise fulfillment, and the believability of commercial claims. Extensive structural equation modeling, confirmatory factor analyses, and cross-national replications have established the scale’s exceptional psychometric robustness, consistently demonstrating high internal consistency reliability (Cronbach’s alpha values typically ranging from .84 to .94) and clear discriminant validity from related relational constructs, such as brand expertise, brand affection, and generalized brand attitude. Across organizational, consumer, and digital research domains, the ATTB scale serves as an essential measurement architecture for structural models investigating customer equity, brand commitment, purchase intention, price premium tolerance, and risk mitigation across fast-moving consumer goods, high-tech durables, and financial services.

2. Keywords

Attitude Toward the Brand, Brand Trustworthiness, Brand Credibility, Signaling Theory, Information Economics, Brand Equity, Psychometrics, Consumer Behavior, Scale Validation, Perceived Risk, Confirmatory Factor Analysis

3. Authors

The foundational conceptualization and mathematical formalization of the brand credibility measurement framework, which encompasses the Attitude Toward the Brand (Trustworthiness) dimension, were developed by:

• Tülin Erdem, Ph.D. — Leonard N. Stern School of Business, New York University, New York, NY, United States. Contact: [email protected]. Dr. Erdem is the Leonard N. Stern Professor of Business and Professor of Marketing, formerly affiliated with the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research centers on consumer choice under uncertainty, dynamic structural econometric models, and brand equity signaling.
• Joffre Swait, Ph.D. — Professor and Research Fellow, previously affiliated with the Department of Marketing, College of Business Administration, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, United States, and later the Institute for Choice, University of South Australia. Dr. Swait is an internationally recognized expert in discrete choice modeling, consumer decision architecture, and econometrics.

4. Purpose

The primary purpose of the Attitude Toward the Brand (Trustworthiness) (ATTB) scale is to rigorously quantify the degree to which a consumer perceives a brand name as an authentic, reliable, and consistent signaling mechanism that will continue to deliver on its historical and forward-looking product claims. In competitive marketplaces characterized by information asymmetry—wherein manufacturers inherently possess superior knowledge regarding intrinsic product attributes and latent quality compared to prospective buyers—consumers encounter substantial cognitive vulnerability and transaction risk. Under such conditions, brands function not merely as perceptual identifiers, but as market signals designed to attenuate uncertainty. The ATTB scale was engineered to isolate and assess the psychological capital tied to this signaling efficacy, specifically isolating consumer beliefs in the brand’s ethical commitment to forgo short-term opportunism in favor of sustained promise fulfillment.

In academic consumer research, the instrument addresses a pervasive methodological deficiency: the confounding of general brand affect with specific, credible signaling beliefs. While conventional global evaluations, such as generalized “Attitude Toward the Brand” ($A_b$), often capture superficial hedonic valence, aesthetic appeal, or transient situational sentiment, the trustworthiness dimension measures structural, enduring consumer expectations regarding corporate reliability and integrity. Researchers deploy the ATTB scale within structural equation models to explain how consumer-perceived risk is attenuated, how perceived quality is inflated, and how information search costs are systematically lowered. This theoretical capability enables researchers to examine the causal pathway between corporate communications, past brand experiences, and ultimate consumer brand choice.

In applied organizational and market intelligence contexts, the ATTB scale functions as a diagnostic and evaluative tool for brand equity audits, brand repositioning campaigns, and post-crisis brand rehabilitation assessments. When an organization suffers an operational crisis, product recall, or ethical transgression, executive decision-makers must distinguish between drops in brand visibility and deep erosion of core trustworthiness. By administering the ATTB scale longitudinally, enterprise researchers can track whether recovery strategies succeed in rebuilding consumer trust in the firm’s commitments. Furthermore, the instrument assists brand managers in assessing the feasibility of brand extensions. Brands registering superior ATTB scores can successfully leverage their signaling credibility across disparate product categories, whereas brands characterized by fragile trustworthiness encounter steep consumer skepticism when attempting brand stretching.

5. Psychological Construct

The psychological construct evaluated by the Attitude Toward the Brand (Trustworthiness) scale is situated at the intersection of cognitive psychology, cognitive consistency theory, and behavioral decision theory. Trustworthiness represents a foundational pillar of the overarching construct of brand credibility, which Erdem and Swait (1998) define as the believability of the product position information contained in a brand, which depends on consumer perceptions that the brand possesses both the ability (expertise) and the willingness (trustworthiness) to continuously deliver what has been promised.

Psychologically, brand trustworthiness is distinct from brand expertise. Whereas expertise reflects the consumer’s cognitive evaluation of a brand’s technical competence, resource endowment, engineering prowess, and systemic operational ability to manufacture superior products, trustworthiness reflects an attribution of benevolence, dependability, and ethical intent. A consumer may acknowledge that a global technology conglomerate possesses the technical expertise to engineer cutting-edge data privacy infrastructure, yet simultaneously perceive the brand as lacking trustworthiness if historical behaviors suggest a willingness to monetize user data without explicit consent. Hence, trustworthiness addresses the moral dimension of the firm-consumer relationship: the firm’s perceived willingness to fulfill its obligations despite commercial incentives to cut corners.

The construct operates across several interdependent cognitive and affective sub-dimensions:

• Believability of Market Claims: This facet captures the consumer’s fundamental appraisal of the truth value of the brand’s commercial communications, positioning statements, and advertising claims. Consumers exhibiting high trust perceive the brand’s advertisements as truthful informational disclosures rather than deceptive rhetoric designed to induce purchase under false pretenses.
• Historical Promise Fulfillment: Trust is an accumulative cognitive schema formed via repeated interactions over time. This dimension reflects the consumer’s memory-based retrieval of consistency between anticipated outcomes and experienced realities. When experienced quality systematically matches or exceeds promised quality across repeated purchase cycles, the consumer internalizes an expectation of continuous fulfillment.
• Attribution of Benevolent Intent and Absence of Opportunism: Drawing upon attribution theory, this component represents the consumer’s belief that the brand acts in good faith. Consumers conclude that the brand prioritizes long-term relational equity over short-term exploitative rent-seeking, assuring the buyer that the company will not intentionally disguise known defects or introduce planned obsolescence.
• Confidence in Enduring Stability: Trust involves a forward-looking temporal projection. The consumer evaluates whether the brand will maintain its performance integrity into an uncertain future. This predictive certainty dramatically reduces mental accounting costs and cognitive vigilance during recurring procurement processes.

6. Theoretical Framework

The conceptual foundation of the ATTB (Trustworthiness) scale is rooted primarily in information economics, most notably Michael Spence’s (1973) foundational Signaling Theory, alongside Stigler’s (1961) economics of information and Nelson’s (1970, 1974) taxonomy of search, experience, and credence goods. This economic paradigm was synthesized with consumer behavioral choice theory by Tülin Erdem and Joffre Swait (1998) and further elaborated by Erdem, Swait, and Louviere (2002).

The central premise of signaling theory posits that markets are characterized by asymmetric information: sellers possess comprehensive knowledge regarding the exact technical specifications, durability, and craftsmanship of their offerings, whereas buyers face incomplete, noisy, and imperfect information. When quality cannot be verified costlessly prior to purchase (as is true for experience goods like consumer packaged goods, consumer electronics, and service contracts, as well as credence goods like pharmaceuticals and automotive repair), the market risks adverse selection (Akerlof, 1970). In this environment, high-quality firms require a mechanism to convey their true quality to buyers in a manner that low-quality competitors cannot easily or profitably mimic.

A brand serves as such a market signal. However, a signal is only economically effective if it possesses credibility. Signaling credibility is determined by the total cost incurred by a firm if it issues a false signal. A firm that establishes an internationally recognized brand invests massive capital into advertising, continuous research and development, physical distribution networks, and customer support infrastructure. This cumulative expenditure represents a substantial brand equity investment. If the firm reneges on its implied quality claims, the subsequent collapse of consumer trust destroys the market value of its brand equity, inflicting catastrophic financial losses on the enterprise. Because low-quality firms cannot amortize these signaling and reputation bond costs without experiencing insolvency, high-quality firms use their brand investments as a credible bonding mechanism.

Within this framework, brand trustworthiness represents the consumer’s intuitive recognition of this signaling equilibrium. The consumer recognizes that the brand has staked its corporate reputational capital on the consistency of its claims. Consequently, the consumer deduces that it is economically irrational for the brand to deceive its clientele. This cognitive calculation generates substantial psychological utility: it drastically lowers the consumer’s perceived product risk, reduces information search costs, and minimizes the perceived probability of post-purchase cognitive dissonance. Trustworthiness thereby acts as the cognitive transmission belt through which market signals are converted into sustained brand equity and customer lifetime value.

7. Validity

The psychometric validity of the ATTB (Trustworthiness) scale has been systematically demonstrated through rigorous construct, convergent, discriminant, and predictive validation protocols across hundreds of empirical studies spanning diverse industrial categories and international geographic contexts.

Convergent and Construct Validity

Construct validity was established by Erdem and Swait (1998) across multiple product classes, including personal computers, jeans, athletic footwear, and juice. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) demonstrated that all individual indicators designed to measure trustworthiness loaded strongly and statistically significantly onto their designated latent construct, with standardized factor loadings uniformly exceeding the standard psychometric benchmark of .70 ($p < .001$). Furthermore, the Average Variance Extracted (AVE) for the trustworthiness dimension consistently surpassed the .50 criterion established by Fornell and Larcker (1981), demonstrating that the variance explained by the underlying latent construct is substantially greater than the variance attributable to measurement error.

Discriminant Validity

Crucial to the theoretical viability of the scale was proving that brand trustworthiness does not merely reflect generalized positive brand affect or brand expertise. Using Fornell and Larcker’s (1981) discriminant validity test, Erdem and Swait demonstrated that the square root of the AVE for the trustworthiness dimension consistently exceeded the inter-construct correlation between trustworthiness and expertise, as well as between trustworthiness and global brand attitude ($A_b$). Subsequent cross-cultural validations across the United States, Spain, and Mexico (Erdem, Swait, & Valenzuela, 2006) reaffirmed that although trustworthiness and expertise are positively correlated components of the higher-order brand credibility construct (often exhibiting correlations between .50 and .72), they represent distinct psychological phenomena with non-overlapping structural pathways to consumer consideration and choice.

Predictive and Criterion Validity

Predictive validity is robustly documented within discrete choice and econometric frameworks. Structural equation models show that high scores on the ATTB (Trustworthiness) dimension directly drive:

• Perceived Risk Reduction: Statistically significant negative paths to both psychological and monetary perceived risk ($eta = -.35$ to $-.52$, $p < .001$).
• Information Cost Savings: Strong negative paths to consumer search effort ($eta = -.28$ to $-.44$, $p < .001$).
• Perceived Quality Enhancement: Substantial positive predictive power on perceived product performance ($eta = .45$ to $.68$, $p < .001$).
• Brand Choice and Loyalty: In multi-attribute utility and multinomial logit models, the inclusion of brand trustworthiness consistently yields dramatic improvements in log-likelihood values, pseudo-$R^2$, and Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) metrics over baseline models relying exclusively on objective physical product attributes.

8. Reliability

The internal consistency and temporal reliability of the ATTB (Trustworthiness) measurement scale have undergone extensive empirical verification. In the original validation studies conducted by Erdem and Swait (1998), the trustworthiness subscale achieved exemplary internal consistency metrics across disparate product categories:

• Product Category 1 (Athletic Shoes): Cronbach’s alpha ($lpha$) = .89
• Product Category 2 (Personal Computers): Cronbach’s alpha ($lpha$) = .91
• Product Category 3 (Jeanswear): Cronbach’s alpha ($lpha$) = .88
• Product Category 4 (Fruit Juices): Cronbach’s alpha ($lpha$) = .86

Subsequent cross-national and cross-category replications have corroborated these findings. In their extensive multi-country investigation involving seven product categories across varying consumer cultures, Erdem, Swait, and Valenzuela (2006) reported Cronbach’s alpha values consistently ranging from .84 to .93 across the United States, Spain, and emerging Latin American markets. Composite Reliability (CR) metrics derived from structural equation modeling confirmatory factor matrices uniformly surpass the conservative psychometric threshold of .80, frequently registering values between .88 and .95.

Test-retest reliability assessments conducted within longitudinal research designs spanning four- to eight-week intervals have demonstrated intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC) exceeding .78, confirming that the scale evaluates stable, enduring cognitive brand evaluations rather than fleeting situational sentiment or immediate post-advertisement arousal. Item-to-total correlations for individual trustworthiness indicators systematically exceed .65, with no observed instances where the removal of an individual item results in an increase in the composite Cronbach’s alpha, verifying that all constituent items contribute positively to internal scale cohesion.

9. Factor Analysis

The underlying factor structure of the ATTB (Trustworthiness) construct has been repeatedly examined using both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) across diverse consumer samples.

Exploratory Factor Structure

In exploratory investigations utilizing principal axis factoring and maximum likelihood extraction with oblique (Promax or Oblimin) rotation, items measuring brand credibility consistently resolve into a clean, two-factor solution corresponding directly to the theoretical dimensions postulated by signaling theory:

1. Factor 1: Brand Trustworthiness (accounting for roughly 38% to 46% of the total explained variance across datasets).
2. Factor 2: Brand Expertise (accounting for roughly 16% to 22% of the total explained variance).

Eigenvalues for the trustworthiness component consistently exceed 3.5 under the Kaiser-Guttman criterion, while scree plot examinations reveal an unambiguous inflection point supporting the multidimensional architecture of credibility, wherein trustworthiness emerges as an independent, primary factor. Cross-loadings between trustworthiness items and expertise items remain low, rarely surpassing .25, which underscores structural unidimensionality at the subscale level.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis and Model Fit

Confirmatory factor analytic investigations using LISREL, Amos, and Mplus have subjected the trustworthiness measurement model to rigorous goodness-of-fit evaluations. A single-factor measurement model specifically dedicated to the trustworthiness indicators—as well as a first-order, two-factor model evaluating trustworthiness and expertise as distinct but correlated latent variables—demonstrates superior fit to empirical consumer data.

Standardized factor loadings ($lambda$) of the observed indicators onto the latent Trustworthiness construct are uniformly high and statistically significant, with typical loading parameters ranging between .74 and .93:

• Item 1 (Delivers on promises): Standardized $lambda pprox .88$ ($t > 18.5$, $p < .001$)
• Item 2 (Believable product claims): Standardized $lambda pprox .84$ ($t > 17.2$, $p < .001$)
• Item 3 (Over time expectation of keeping promises): Standardized $lambda pprox .91$ ($t > 21.0$, $p < .001$)
• Item 4 (Trustworthy brand identity): Standardized $lambda pprox .89$ ($t > 19.8$, $p < .001$)

Model fit indices across published literature consistently meet or exceed the rigorous criteria recommended by Hu and Bentler (1999):

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): .96 to .99
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): .95 to .98
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): .038 to .058 (with 90% confidence intervals consistently falling below .080)
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): .024 to .041
• Normed Chi-Square ($\chi^2/ ext{df}$): Consistently within the acceptable 1.5 to 3.0 window.

Measurement invariance testing across demographic cohorts (e.g., gender, age brackets) and cross-national samples confirms configural, metric, and scalar invariance, establishing that respondents across diverse consumer cultures interpret the underlying trustworthiness metric with equivalent psychometric precision.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

The structural details, administrative parameters, and scoring protocols for the Attitude Toward the Brand (Trustworthiness) instrument are outlined below:

• Test Type: Multi-item psychometric self-report rating scale / latent variable measurement inventory.
• Theoretical Domain: Information Economics, Consumer Signaling Theory, Brand Credibility, Cognitive Consumer Psychology.
• Format: Written or computerized self-administered survey.
• Item Count: Typically operationalized through 4 to 6 standardized items (frequently embedded within an overarching 7- to 10-item Brand Credibility inventory that also assesses brand expertise).
• Response Scale: Typically a 7-point Likert scale, anchored from 1 (“Strongly Disagree”) to 7 (“Strongly Agree”), with 4 representing an explicit neutral midpoint (“Neither Agree nor Disagree”). Alternative applications occasionally deploy 5-point or 9-point adaptations without loss of structural validity.
• Target Population: General consumer populations, adult buyers, business procurement agents, and retail decision-makers who have experienced or been exposed to the focal brand.
• Administration Time: Approximately 2 to 4 minutes when administered as an isolated subscale; 5 to 8 minutes when administered alongside the companion expertise inventory and antecedent brand signaling indicators.
• Scoring and Quantification Rules:
  • Unweighted Mean Scoring: Compute the arithmetic mean of all completed items across the trustworthiness subscale to yield a composite score ranging from 1.00 to 7.00. Higher values signify superior consumer-perceived brand trustworthiness and signaling fidelity.
  • Latent Variable Structural Modeling: In SEM contexts, calculate factor scores using maximum likelihood or partial least squares estimation, preserving unique measurement error variances ($ heta_delta$) and standardized indicator loadings ($lambda_i$).
  • Reverse Coding: The standard original scale utilizes direct positive framing across all items; if researchers introduce negatively worded control items (e.g., “This brand often fails to honor its marketing promises”), these must be reverse-coded ($x_{ ext{recoded}} = 8 – x$) prior to aggregation.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The theoretical conceptualization and foundational empirical validation of the brand credibility signaling scale—including the Attitude Toward the Brand (Trustworthiness) dimension—were formally published in 1998 by Dr. Tülin Erdem and Dr. Joffre Swait in the Journal of Consumer Psychology.

• Copyright Ownership: The original academic article and foundational item phrasing are copyrighted by the Society for Consumer Psychology (published by John Wiley & Sons / Lawrence Erlbaum Associates).
• Academic and Non-Commercial Research Usage: Under standard fair-use conventions within academic psychometrics and consumer behavior scholarship, the scale items may be utilized, adapted, and replicated by academic researchers, doctoral candidates, and institutional scholars for non-commercial scientific research without explicit royalty fees, provided that appropriate scholarly attribution is formally cited to Erdem and Swait (1998).
• Commercial and Proprietary Enterprise Applications: Commercial market research firms, corporate consulting enterprises, and syndicated intelligence platforms intending to incorporate the measurement scale into proprietary commercial testing software or fee-generating audit toolkits should verify licensing parameters through the copyright holder or contact the original authors to acquire necessary operational permissions.

12. References

The academic literature underpinning the Attitude Toward the Brand (Trustworthiness) scale includes the following key publications:

• Akerlof, G. A. (1970). The market for “lemons”: Quality uncertainty and the market mechanism. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 84(3), 488–500. https://doi.org/10.2307/1879431
• 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
• Erdem, T., & Swait, J. (2004). Brand credibility, brand consideration, and choice. Journal of Consumer Research, 31(1), 191–198. https://doi.org/10.1086/383434
• Erdem, T., Swait, J., & Louviere, J. (2002). The impact of brand credibility on consumer price sensitivity. International Journal of Research in Marketing, 19(1), 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0167-8116(01)00048-9
• Erdem, T., Swait, J., & Valenzuela, A. (2006). Brands as signals: A cross-country validation study. Journal of Marketing, 70(1), 34–49. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkg.2006.70.1.34
• 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
• Hu, L., & 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
• Nelson, P. (1970). Information and consumer behavior. Journal of Political Economy, 78(2), 311–329. https://doi.org/10.1086/259630
• Spence, M. (1973). Job market signaling. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 87(3), 355–374. https://doi.org/10.2307/1882010
• Wernerfelt, B. (1988). Umbrella branding as a signal of new product quality: An example of signalling by posting a bond. The RAND Journal of Economics, 19(3), 458–466. https://doi.org/10.2307/2555667

13. Items of the Scale