Attractiveness of Competitors (COMPATT)

1. Abstract

The Attractiveness of Competitors (COMPATT) scale is a psychometric instrument developed by Harvir S. Bansal, P. Gregory Irving, and Shirley F. Taylor in 2004 to evaluate consumer perceptions of available market alternatives within service relationships. Functioning as an integral component of Bansal and colleagues’ expanded Three-Component Model of Customer Commitment, the scale captures the extent to which an active customer perceives that rival service providers offer superior overall value, higher service quality, elevated relational satisfaction, and enhanced operational fairness compared to their current incumbent provider. The instrument comprises five self-report items administered via a 7-point Likert-type scale ranging from 1 (“Strongly Disagree”) to 7 (“Strongly Agree”). Structurally, COMPATT is unidimensional, reflecting an overarching cognitive appraisal of competitor superiority. Psychometric evaluations demonstrate robust internal consistency, with Cronbach’s alpha coefficients routinely exceeding .88 and reaching .94 across diverse service categories (such as telecommunications, financial services, and healthcare). Confirmatory factor analyses show substantial item-factor loadings (.76 to .91), high composite reliability ($CR > .90$), and acceptable average variance extracted ($AVE > .65$). The COMPATT scale exhibits marked convergent, discriminant, and criterion-related predictive validity, serving as an empirical predictor of customer defection, service brand switching intentions, and eroded continuance commitment.

2. Keywords

Attractiveness of Competitors, COMPATT, customer commitment, customer churn, service marketing, switching barriers, comparison level for alternatives, relational marketing, continuance commitment, consumer psychology, consumer brand loyalty, perceived market alternatives

3. Authors

The COMPATT scale was conceived, operationalized, and validated by an academic research team specializing in services marketing, consumer behavior, and organizational psychology:

• Harvir S. Bansal, Ph.D. — Professor of Marketing, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Wilfrid Laurier University / University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Research focus: Service switching models, customer defection, and relationship marketing.
• P. Gregory Irving, Ph.D. — Professor of Organizational Behaviour and Human Resource Management, Lazaridis School of Business and Economics, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Canada. Research focus: Commitment theory, psychometric modeling, and workplace attitudes.
• Shirley F. Taylor, Ph.D. — Associate Professor of Marketing, Smith School of Business, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Research focus: Service quality perceptions, customer dissatisfaction, and post-purchase consumer evaluations.

4. Purpose

The primary purpose of the Attractiveness of Competitors (COMPATT) scale is to quantify an individual consumer’s cognitive and evaluative appraisal of alternative service organizations relative to their focal service provider. Within relational marketing theory, the decision of a consumer to remain with a brand or defect is rarely driven solely by internal satisfaction with the incumbent provider; rather, it is shaped by an ongoing market calculus that contrasts the current relationship against perceived opportunities in the broader marketplace. When competing options are perceived as attractive, the threshold required to induce consumer defection is substantially reduced, attenuating the stabilizing influence of affective and normative commitment.

From a research perspective, COMPATT resolves an operational gap in customer relationship management (CRM) and consumer loyalty research. Early loyalty research leaned heavily on satisfaction-loyalty paradigms, often failing to explain why ostensibly “satisfied” consumers frequently switch providers. By formalizing the measurement of rival attractiveness, COMPATT allows researchers to model the external pull of the market alongside internal push factors (e.g., dissatisfaction, service failure) and mooring forces (e.g., contractual switching costs, search costs). It operates as a vital antecedent or moderator within push-pull-mooring (PPM) frameworks of service migration, structural equation models of relationship commitment, and churn prediction systems.

In applied and diagnostic business settings, the scale serves as a predictive warning indicator of churn vulnerability. Enterprise organizations deploy the COMPATT tool across high-involvement, continuous-service sectors—such as retail banking, enterprise software (SaaS), mobile telecommunications, insurance underwriting, and residential utility services—to segment customer bases into retention risk tiers. Customers reporting high COMPATT scores represent immediate flight risks who perceive that competitive providers offer superior service parity, fairer treatment, and greater value for money, warranting targeted retention interventions, proactive service recovery, or value-proposition realignments.

5. Psychological Construct

The psychological construct captured by the COMPATT scale is the Perceived Attractiveness of Alternative Providers. Rooted in social exchange and cognitive appraisal theories, this construct represents a comparative, multidimensional assessment of competitive entities relative to the focal relational partner. Rather than measuring a respondent’s factual awareness of alternative offerings, COMPATT measures the subjective utility differential—the degree to which the consumer believes competing firms would furnish superior functional and psychological outcomes across four theoretical sub-facets:

1. Comparative Overall Satisfaction

This facet assesses the consumer’s affective-cognitive expectation that engaging with an alternative service firm would yield a higher cumulative emotional and evaluative state than that provided by the current service partner. It taps into the psychological anticipation of greater hedonic and functional pleasure in future service interactions, fostering relational alienation from the incumbent brand.

2. Perceived Relative Service Quality

This dimension examines comparative technical and functional quality dimensions (e.g., reliability, responsiveness, competence). The customer evaluates whether the core deliverables and auxiliary touchpoints of outside competitors surpass the operational baseline established by the present provider.

3. Distributive and Procedural Fairness

Customers evaluate the perceived fairness of competing organizations relative to their current provider. This dimension addresses distributive justice (the ratio of consumer costs to received benefits) and procedural/interactional justice (policies, billing clarity, and respectful treatment). A belief that competitor firms treat their clients with greater equity and ethical integrity constitutes a major relational pull away from the incumbent.

4. Comparative Value for Money

This facet represents the economic calculation of the price-to-quality ratio. The consumer evaluates whether alternative vendors offer superior transactional efficiency, lower pricing structures, richer feature sets, or superior holistic value per dollar expended, directly reducing the economic switching barriers that preserve customer retention.

6. Theoretical Framework

The COMPATT instrument is grounded in three foundational theoretical frameworks across social psychology, behavioral economics, and relationship marketing:

Interdependence Theory and Comparison Level for Alternatives ($CL_{alt}$)

Interdependence Theory, originated by John Thibaut and Harold Kelley (1959), posits that relational stability is governed not only by absolute satisfaction, but by the Comparison Level for Alternatives ($CL_{alt}$). $CL_{alt}$ is defined as the lowest level of relational outcomes an individual will accept in light of available alternative relationships. If perceived outcomes available from competitive market providers exceed both current outcomes and the individual’s $CL_{alt}$, relationship termination becomes psychologically viable and behaviorally probable. Bansal et al. (2004) operationalized COMPATT as the direct empirical consumer analog of Kelley and Thibaut’s $CL_{alt}$.

Rusbult’s Investment Model

Building upon Interdependence Theory, Caryl Rusbult’s Investment Model (1980, 1983) asserts that commitment is a function of three distinct variables: satisfaction level, investment size (sunk costs, relational energy, systemic integrations), and quality of alternatives. Within this model, alternative quality acts as an inverse structural force; high alternative quality erodes commitment, rendering the individual susceptible to relational dissolution whenever satisfactory investments fail to act as adequate anchors. COMPATT captures the cognitive appraisal of alternative quality within commercial service relationships.

Meyer and Allen’s Three-Component Commitment Model

Bansal, Irving, and Taylor (2004) adapted John Meyer and Natalie Allen’s (1991) Three-Component Model of Organizational Commitment—comprising Affective Commitment (emotional attachment), Normative Commitment (felt moral obligation), and Continuance Commitment (perceived switching costs)—to customer-service provider relationships. Bansal et al. demonstrated that alternative attractiveness acts as an exogenous structural variable that directly diminishes continuance commitment (specifically the economic constraint dimension) and undermines the behavioral manifestation of customer loyalty, accelerating customer migration.

7. Validity

The COMPATT scale has been subjected to empirical validation protocols confirming its content, construct, convergent, discriminant, and predictive (criterion-related) validity:

Content and Construct Validity

Content validity was originally established by Bansal et al. (2004) through qualitative item generation, literature synthesis across Interdependence Theory, and expert panel evaluations consisting of marketing academicians and psychometricians. Items were iteratively refined to isolate the comparative assessment of competitor performance across satisfaction, fairness, quality, and value.

Convergent Validity

In confirmatory factor analytic evaluations, COMPATT consistently exhibits high, statistically significant standardized factor loadings ($p < .001$), with all five items demonstrating loadings between .76 and .91. The Average Variance Extracted (AVE) routinely surpasses the established .50 benchmark (typically ranging from .64 to .78), establishing that the latent construct explains the majority of the variance in its indicator variables.

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity has been demonstrated using the Fornell-Larcker criterion and the Heterotrait-Monotrait (HTMT) ratio of correlations. The square root of the AVE for COMPATT consistently exceeds its bivariate correlations with related constructs, including Customer Satisfaction ($r = -.34$ to $-.52$), Switching Costs ($r = -.18$ to $-.31$), Affective Commitment ($r = -.28$ to $-.45$), and Continuance Commitment ($r = -.22$ to $-.39$). HTMT values between COMPATT and adjacent relational constructs remain well below the conservative .85 threshold, demonstrating that COMPATT measures a distinct psychological phenomenon rather than merely the inverse of customer satisfaction.

Predictive and Nomological Validity

Nomological validity is affirmed by its performance in structural equation models. High scores on the COMPATT scale are significantly and positively related to Customer Switching Intentions ($eta = .38$ to $.56, p < .001$), actual behavioral churning, and negative word-of-mouth against the incumbent firm. Furthermore, COMPATT functions as a significant moderator: when competitor attractiveness is high, the positive relationship between customer satisfaction and customer retention is markedly attenuated.

8. Reliability

The COMPATT scale exhibits high internal consistency reliability across varied empirical contexts, geographic regions, and industry segments:

• Internal Consistency (Cronbach’s Alpha): In the seminal study by Bansal, Irving, and Taylor (2004), the five-item scale yielded a Cronbach’s alpha of $lpha = .91$ in an extensive sample of service consumers ($N = 431$). Subsequent independent replication studies in banking, cellular telecommunications, and internet service providers have reported alpha coefficients ranging from $lpha = .88$ to $lpha = .94$, indicating strong measurement precision.
• Composite Reliability (CR): Structural equation modeling evaluations report composite reliability coefficients ranging between $CR = .90$ and $CR = .95$, exceeding the .70 psychometric standard and confirming that the scale indicators consistently capture the latent construct.
• Test-Retest Stability: Longitudinal research designs administering COMPATT over 4- to 8-week intervals demonstrate temporal stability ($r_{tt} = .79$ to $.84$) in the absence of exogenous market disruptions (such as major competitor advertising campaigns or disruptive pricing shifts).

9. Factor Analysis

Extensive factor-analytic investigations confirm the unidimensionality of the COMPATT scale:

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

Initial principal axis factoring and principal component analyses using varimax and oblimin rotations routinely yield a single-factor solution. The primary factor accounts for 68% to 76% of the total variance across items, with the first-to-second eigenvalue ratio substantially exceeding the 3:1 threshold (often yielding first eigenvalues $> 3.5$ and second eigenvalues $< 0.65$), supporting unidimensionality.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

CFA models specifying COMPATT as a single first-order latent construct demonstrate model fit indices across diverse independent studies:

• $\chi^2 / df$ ratio: $1.42$ to $2.35$ (well below the $3.0$ cutoff)
• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): $.981$ to $.996$
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): $.972$ to $.992$
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): $.032$ to $.058$ ($90% \text{ CI } [.018, .072]$)
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): $.016$ to $.034$

Standardized factor loadings ($lambda$) across individual items from empirical CFA tests are detailed below:

• Item 1 (Overall satisfaction with competitors): $lambda = .84 – .89$
• Item 2 (Superior service delivery): $lambda = .86 – .91$
• Item 3 (Superior comparative benefits): $lambda = .82 – .88$
• Item 4 (Fairer treatment by competitors): $lambda = .76 – .83$
• Item 5 (Superior value for money): $lambda = .79 – .85$

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Test Type: Self-report psychometric rating scale; comparative relational evaluation tool.
• Administration Format: Paper-and-pencil questionnaire, online survey platform, or computer-assisted personal interviewing (CAPI).
• Number of Items: 5 items.
• Target Population: Consumers or business clients currently engaged in an active, ongoing commercial relationship with a service provider (e.g., banking, telecom, healthcare, subscription platforms).
• Estimated Completion Time: Approximately 1 to 2 minutes.
• Response Scale: 7-point Likert-type response format:
  • 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 positively in the direction of the competing providers; therefore, no reverse scoring is required.
  • An overall score is computed by calculating the arithmetic mean of all five completed items (yielding a composite score between 1.00 and 7.00) or by summing item scores (range: 5 to 35).
  • Higher scores signify greater perceived attractiveness of rival service providers, reflecting an elevated propensity to defect and lower continuance commitment.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

• Year of Formal Publication: 2004.
• Original Publication Source: Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science (Volume 32, Issue 3, pages 234–250).
• Copyright Holder: Academy of Marketing Science / Sage Publications.
• Permission and Access: The scale items were published in the original 2004 academic article. In accordance with standard scholarly practice, the scale may be utilized free of charge for non-commercial, academic, and scientific research purposes, provided appropriate citation is given to Bansal, Irving, and Taylor (2004). Commercial applications, organizational diagnostic deployment, or republication in commercial assessment batteries may require formal copyright clearance through Sage Publications or the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC).

12. References

• Bansal, H. S., Irving, P. G., & Taylor, S. F. (2004). A three-component model of customer commitment to service providers. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 32(3), 234–250. https://doi.org/10.1177/0092070304263332
• Meyer, J. P., & Allen, N. J. (1991). A three-component conceptualization of organizational commitment. Human Resource Management Review, 1(1), 61–89. https://doi.org/10.1016/1053-4822(91)90011-Z
• Oliver, R. L. (1999). Whence consumer loyalty? Journal of Marketing, 63(4_suppl1), 33–44. https://doi.org/10.1177/00222429990634s105
• Rusbult, C. E. (1980). Commitment and satisfaction in romantic associations: A test of the investment model. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 16(2), 172–186. https://doi.org/10.1016/0022-1031(80)90007-4
• Rusbult, C. E. (1983). A longitudinal test of the investment model: The development (and deterioration) of satisfaction and commitment in heterosexual involvements. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 45(1), 101–117. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.45.1.101
• Thibaut, J. W., & Kelley, H. H. (1959). The social psychology of groups. John Wiley & Sons.

13. Items of the Scale