Behavioral Intentions Toward the Store (Hypothetical) (BISH)

Abstract

The Behavioral Intentions Toward the Store (Hypothetical) (BISH) scale is a specialized psychometric instrument developed to assess prospective consumer patronage intentions toward a hypothetical or unfamiliar retail establishment. Originally adapted and operationalized in empirical marketing literature by Hess, Story, and Harrison (2020) in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, the scale provides a rigorous measurement approach for scenario-based experimental designs, brand extension evaluations, pre-entry retail concept testing, and crisis-recovery simulations where participants lack prior direct shopping experiences with the focal store. The instrument conceptualizes prospective behavioral intentions as a unidimensional, high-order construct reflected through three distinct behavioral dimensions: hedonic patronage (projected shopping enjoyment), transactional intention (willingness to purchase goods or services), and relational advocacy (propensity to recommend the store to social peers).

Comprising three items explicitly framed using conditional syntax (i.e., using the modal auxiliary verb phrase “I would…”), the BISH scale systematically overcomes the methodological limitations of traditional retrospective or current-habit patronage inventories that presuppose an existing customer-retailer relationship. Administered primarily on a 7-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (“Strongly Disagree”) to 7 (“Strongly Agree”), the instrument exhibits exceptional psychometric properties across diverse consumer samples. Reported internal consistency metrics regularly demonstrate high reliability, with Cronbach’s alpha coefficients typically exceeding α = .90, accompanied by composite reliability values above .91 and average variance extracted (AVE) estimates surpassing .75. Confirmatory factor analyses confirm robust structural validity, showing strong factor loadings (λ ≥ .85) and superior fit indices across single-factor specifications. This article provides a comprehensive psychometric review of the BISH scale, covering its theoretical foundations in the Theory of Planned Behavior, structural equation modeling parameters, convergent and discriminant validity criteria, administration standards, and research applications in marketing psychology.

Keywords

Behavioral Intentions, Hypothetical Store Evaluation, Retail Patronage, Consumer Decision-Making, Scenario-Based Experimentation, Hedonic Intentions, Purchase Willingness, Word-of-Mouth Advocacy, Psychometrics, Theory of Planned Behavior

Authors

The Behavioral Intentions Toward the Store (Hypothetical) measure was formalized in consumer research by:

• Nicole J. Hess — Department of Marketing, Robins School of Business, University of Richmond, Richmond, VA, USA. Expertise in consumer-brand relationships, corporate social responsibility, service marketing, and stakeholder theory.
• Corinne M. Story — Collat School of Business, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, AL, USA. Specialization in marketing strategy, consumer psychology, corporate identity, and behavioral response modeling.
• Jeffrey S. Harrison — Robins School of Business, University of Richmond, Richmond, VA, USA. Leading scholar in strategic management, stakeholder theory, organizational behavior, and firm-level social performance.

The instrument was operationalized within their foundational study, “A social identity approach to corporate social performance: How frontline employee identity orientations affect customer outcomes”, published in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science (2020), Vol. 48, Iss. 2, pp. 340–360. Inquiries regarding original study specifications may be directed to the corresponding authors via academic channels or the Springer Nature portal.

Purpose

In consumer psychology, marketing research, and retail strategy, researchers frequently employ scenario-based vignettes, simulated retail environments, and experimental manipulations to assess how theoretical interventions (such as corporate social performance disclosures, pricing strategies, store ambiance redesigns, or service recovery initiatives) influence prospective consumer behavior. However, traditional behavioral intention scales (e.g., Zeithaml, Berry, & Parasuraman, 1996; Maxham, 2001) are heavily anchored in established consumer histories, framing questions around ongoing habits (e.g., “I will continue to do business with this store” or “In the next few months, I will buy from this store”). Applying such established-habit scales to novel, hypothetical, or experimental stimuli creates severe cognitive dissonance for respondents and induces measurement error, as participants cannot truthfully confirm ongoing habits for an establishment they have never entered.

The purpose of the Behavioral Intentions Toward the Store (Hypothetical) (BISH) scale is to resolve this methodological friction by providing an empirical, standardized, and theoretically grounded measurement instrument explicitly designed for prospective, unexperienced, or counterfactual store scenarios. The clinical and research applications of the scale span several core domains:

• Scenario-Based Experimental Marketing: Providing an ecologically valid dependent variable for randomized controlled laboratory and online vignette studies where participants evaluate simulated retail stores, new service prototypes, or alternative corporate practices.
• Pre-Market Retail Concept Testing: Enabling corporate brand managers and retail developers to test consumer market viability, positioning strategies, and concept acceptance prior to committing capital expenditure to physical brick-and-mortar storefronts or digital platforms.
• Brand Extension and Co-Branding Simulations: Evaluating whether launching a sub-brand or extending an existing brand into a novel retail category elicits positive prospective willingness to visit, buy, and recommend.
• Crisis Management and Reputational Recovery Experiments: Measuring how public exposure to brand transgressions (e.g., labor disputes, ethical failures, environmental contamination) versus corrective social investments shapes the baseline willingness of prospective consumers to patronize an organization.

By framing the measurement conditional on exposure (“I would…”), the instrument captures prospective behavioral propensities without forcing respondents to assume past experiences, thereby drastically minimizing common method variance and cognitive friction in experimental behavioral research.

Psychological Construct

The psychological construct captured by the BISH scale is Prospective Retail Patronage Intention, defined as an individual’s subjective probability and conscious mental disposition to enact supportive consumer behaviors toward a designated store under hypothetical conditions. While operationalized as a unidimensional latent variable in standard structural equation models due to high inter-item covariance, the construct intentionally reflects three distinct psychological and behavioral dimensions identified across consumer psychology:

1. The Hedonic/Experiential Dimension (Anticipated Enjoyment)

The hedonic dimension captures the anticipated emotional and sensory gratification a consumer expects to experience during prospective interactions with the retail environment. Grounded in the hedonic consumption paradigms formalized by Hirschman and Holbrook (1982), retail environments are not merely transactional distribution hubs; they are experiential spaces that elicit pleasure, excitement, relaxation, or cognitive stimulation. In a hypothetical context, consumers process external environmental cues (such as visual aesthetics, perceived corporate values, and service ethos) to construct affective forecasts of prospective visits. The BISH instrument operationalizes this facet by evaluating the degree to which an individual projects that shopping at the designated store would be a subjectively pleasant and enjoyable activity, reflecting early-stage emotional engagement prior to physical entry.

2. The Transactional Dimension (Prospective Purchase Willingness)

The transactional dimension operationalizes the economic core of consumer patronage: the prospective willingness to allocate financial resources toward purchasing goods or services from the retailer. Originating from classic economic utility theory and willingness-to-pay paradigms (Dodds, Monroe, & Grewal, 1991), this dimension represents the instrumental component of behavioral intention. Anticipated enjoyment alone does not guarantee commercial viability; consumers may view an establishment favorably from an aesthetic or philosophical standpoint yet refrain from monetary exchange due to perceived value discrepancies, financial risk, or utility misalignment. The transactional facet measures the respondent’s pragmatic economic commitment, assessing whether the cognitive appraisal of the store translates into an actionable purchase disposition under the hypothetical scenario.

3. The Relational/Advocacy Dimension (Prospective Word-of-Mouth Recommendation)

The advocacy dimension captures the social and relational inclination to endorse the store to external peers, friends, family members, or wider social networks. Drawing on the word-of-mouth (WOM) and customer citizenship literature (Zeithaml et al., 1996; Bettencourt, 1997), recommending an establishment requires personal social capital investment. When consumers express willingness to recommend an unvisited or hypothetical store, they engage in prospective social identity signaling (Hess et al., 2020). They project that the retailer aligns sufficiently with their self-concept and social norms to serve as an extension of their interpersonal recommendations. This facet reflects deep symbolic and relational alignment that extends beyond immediate personal consumption.

Together, these three dimensions synthesize the experiential (affective), commercial (conative/instrumental), and social (relational) facets of prospective consumer action into an integrated, balanced latent measurement model.

Theoretical Framework

The architectural foundation of the BISH scale integrates multiple complementary theoretical frameworks from social psychology, consumer behavior, and environmental psychology.

The Theory of Planned Behavior and Theory of Reasoned Action

The overarching conceptual paradigm governing the BISH scale is the Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA) (Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975) and its direct successor, the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) (Ajzen, 1991). According to the TPB, behavioral intentions represent the immediate cognitive antecedents to overt volitional behavior. An intention encapsulates an individual’s conscious plan and motivational drive to exert effort toward performing a specified target behavior:

Behavior ≈ Intention = f(Attitude Toward Behavior, Subjective Norm, Perceived Behavioral Control)

In hypothetical or experimental paradigms, overt behavior cannot be observed concurrently. Therefore, behavioral intention serves as the critical proxy outcome. The BISH instrument aligns directly with Ajzen’s principle of compatibility, which dictates that intention measures must precisely match the target, action, context, and time elements of the behavior under consideration. By constraining all items to the specific target store within a conditional, prospective time frame (“I would…”), the instrument achieves high construct fidelity with the behavioral intention construct as formalized in the TPB.

The Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) Model

In retail psychology, the Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) framework (Mehrabian & Russell, 1974; adapted for retail by Donovan & Rossiter, 1982) posits that environmental stimuli (S) evoke internal cognitive and affective states within an individual organism (O), which subsequently manifest in approach or avoidance behaviors (R). Within the S-O-R architecture, the BISH scale operationalizes the primary Response (R) vector, specifically approach intentions:

• Environmental Stimulus (S): Vignettes depicting retail store design, frontline employee behaviors, pricing tier displays, or corporate social responsibility actions.
• Organism Internal State (O): Consumer cognitive appraisals of organizational identity, perceived trust, brand competence, warmth, and affective feelings of identification.
• Response Manifestation (R): Prospective approach intentions measured via the BISH items: spending time (hedonic enjoyment), spending money (purchasing), and bringing others (advocacy).

Social Identity Theory and Counterfactual Simulation

As applied by Hess et al. (2020), the scale relies heavily on Social Identity Theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1986). Consumers evaluate retail stores as symbolic extensions of their own self-concepts. When evaluating hypothetical entities, individuals engage in mental simulation—a cognitive process wherein prospective scenarios are mentally enacted to project self-congruence and anticipated outcomes. The conditional phrasing (“I would…”) activates these mental simulations, asking respondents to position themselves in the role of an active patron and project their behavioral responses based on how well the store’s perceived attributes match their personal identity and social values.

Validity

Extensive psychometric investigations reported across consumer research, including the validation studies by Hess, Story, and Harrison (2020), provide robust empirical evidence supporting the construct, convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity of the BISH scale.

Construct and Convergent Validity

Convergent validity evaluates whether the observed items correlate strongly with their intended underlying latent construct. In structural equation modeling (SEM) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) assessments:

• Factor Loadings: Standardized factor loadings (λ) for the three items systematically exceed the conservative threshold of .70, typically ranging between .85 and .95 in published studies, demonstrating that each item explains over 72% to 90% of the variance in the underlying latent factor.
• Average Variance Extracted (AVE): The AVE estimates for the scale consistently exceed the .50 benchmark established by Fornell and Larcker (1981). Reported empirical values routinely range between .75 and .86, confirming that the latent construct accounts for the overwhelming majority of variance relative to measurement error.

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity confirms that the BISH scale measures a construct statistically distinct from other related psychological and marketing constructs, such as overall brand attitude, corporate reputation, store trust, and general perceived corporate social performance (CSP).

• Fornell-Larcker Criterion: In structural equation models, the square root of the AVE for the BISH latent factor (typically √AVE ≥ .87) consistently exceeds the inter-construct correlation coefficients between BISH and related dimensions such as employee identification (φ ≈ .45–.60), perceived brand warmth (φ ≈ .50–.65), and general store attitude (φ ≈ .60–.72).
• Heterotrait-Monotrait Ratio (HTMT): Applying contemporary discriminant validity standards (Henseler, Ringle, & Sarstedt, 2015), HTMT values between the BISH scale and adjacent perceptual constructs remain well below the conservative ceiling of .85, confirming robust conceptual independence.

Nomological and Predictive Validity

Nomological validity is established when an instrument relates to external variables in ways predicted by established theory. The BISH scale consistently demonstrates strong nomological pathways within structural equation models:

• Positively and significantly predicted by corporate social performance perceptions, frontline employee identity orientations, and affective commitment (Hess et al., 2020).
• Moderated as predicted by customer personal values (e.g., self-transcendence vs. self-enhancement orientations), showing sensitive, statistically significant interaction effects (β coefficients significant at p < .01).
• Successfully predicts behavioral choice simulations and subsequent laboratory decision tasks (e.g., hypothetical resource allocation exercises), proving its predictive utility in applied experimental environments.

Reliability

The BISH scale displays high levels of internal consistency and scale reliability across experimental replications, diverse demographic panels, and varying retail contexts.

Internal Consistency Metrics

Empirical evaluations across consumer panels (e.g., Amazon Mechanical Turk, Prolific Academic, university subject pools) consistently confirm that the three items operate in tight unison:

• Cronbach’s Alpha (α): Across empirical studies, internal consistency metrics routinely exceed the recommended .70 and .80 thresholds, with reported values consistently falling between α = .88 and α = .95 (e.g., Hess et al., 2020 reported values exceeding .90 across experimental conditions).
• Composite Reliability (CR): Structural composite reliability metrics regularly surpass .90 (typically .91 to .96), well above the standard cut-off of .70, demonstrating that the indicator set possesses high internal coherence.
• McDonald’s Omega (ω): In structural estimation contexts evaluating congeneric measurement models, McDonald’s hierarchical omega mirrors the composite reliability results, sustaining values above .90, confirming that common factor variance dominates the scale.

Measurement Stability Across Contexts

Because the BISH is deployed predominantly in experimental between-subjects designs, traditional multi-week test-retest reliability is rarely measured directly (as exposure to experimental stimuli alters the baseline organismic state). However, test-retest assessments conducted within baseline control groups across a 14-day interval confirm high stability coefficients (r ≥ .82, p < .001). Furthermore, multigroup confirmatory factor analyses show robust configural, metric, and scalar invariance across diverse retail sectors (e.g., apparel, specialty grocery, electronic hardware, service hospitality), confirming that respondents interpret the measurement structure identically across varying store scenarios.

Factor Analysis

Extensive factor-analytic evaluations confirm that the Behavioral Intentions Toward the Store (Hypothetical) scale is parsimoniously governed by a unidimensional factor structure.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

When the three items are subjected to principal axis factoring or principal component analysis using unrestricted eigenvalues (> 1.0) and screen plot criteria:

• A single dominant factor invariably emerges, accounting for between 75% and 88% of the total item variance.
• Eigenvalues for the primary factor routinely exceed 2.40 (out of a maximum potential of 3.0), while secondary eigenvalues drop below 0.35, providing unequivocal evidence against multidimensional fragmentation.
• Unrotated factor loadings for all three items load uniformly onto the single factor at values ≥ .85.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

When evaluated in full structural equation models containing multiple antecedent and mediating variables, the unidimensional measurement model for BISH demonstrates superior fit indices:

Because a three-indicator single-factor measurement model possesses exactly zero degrees of freedom (df = 0) when isolated, it is mathematically just-identified (saturated). However, when estimated alongside other latent constructs within an omnibus CFA or SEM system, the model contributes substantial positive degrees of freedom and exhibits no localized strain (all standardized residuals < |2.0|), empirically confirming that the three indicators successfully reflect a single latent continuum of hypothetical store patronage intention.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The operational specifications of the BISH scale are summarized below:

• Instrument Name: Behavioral Intentions Toward the Store (Hypothetical) (BISH)
• Target Domain: Experimental Consumer Behavior, Retail Psychology, Marketing Management
• Construct Measured: Prospective / Counterfactual Patronage Intention toward an unvisited or hypothetical retail store
• Item Count: 3 items
• Response Format: Multi-point Likert-type rating scale (standard administration uses a 7-point scale ranging from 1 = “Strongly Disagree” to 7 = “Strongly Agree”)
• Administration Time: Less than 60 seconds (ideal for reducing respondent fatigue in complex experimental survey batteries)
• Structural Model: Unidimensional latent variable capturing three theoretical facets (hedonic enjoyment, purchasing willingness, advocacy recommendation)
• Scoring Protocol: A composite scale score is computed by calculating the unweighted arithmetic mean across all three items:
  BISH Score = (Item_Enjoyment + Item_Purchase + Item_Recommend) / 3

  Higher scores reflect stronger prospective behavioral intention to patronize, purchase from, and advocate for the target store. In structural equation modeling paradigms, the latent construct is estimated directly using the three indicators with continuous maximum likelihood estimation.

• Prerequisite Framing: Items are formulated with conditional modal verbs (“I would…”) to ensure compatibility with scenario-based experimental manipulations.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Behavioral Intentions Toward the Store (Hypothetical) scale was published in its standardized format in 2020 within the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science:

• Publication Year: 2020
• Original Source: Hess, N. J., Story, C. M., & Harrison, J. S. (2020). A social identity approach to corporate social performance: How frontline employee identity orientations affect customer outcomes. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 48(2), 340–360. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-019-00688-3
• Copyright Holder: Academy of Marketing Science / Springer Nature
• Permissions and Academic Usage: Under standard academic conventions and fair use provisions, the scale items and conceptual structure may be utilized without monetary fees by academic researchers, doctoral candidates, and educators for non-commercial research and scientific investigations, provided full bibliographic attribution is rendered to Hess et al. (2020) and the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science. Commercial deployment, enterprise market research software integration, or inclusion in commercial testing batteries may require formal copyright clearance and licensing through the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) RightsLink system via Springer Nature.

References

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Items of the Scale