Brand Agency (BRAG2)

Abstract

The Brand Agency (BRAG2) scale is a specialized psychometric instrument developed by Joshua T. Beck, Ryan Rahinel, and Alexander Bleier (2020) to quantify consumer perceptions of a commercial brand's capacity to act as an intentional, efficacious social force. Grounded in the intersection of mind perception theory and compensatory control theory, the scale captures the degree to which an individual views a brand as possessing broad societal agency—specifically its capability to shape systemic outcomes, exert profound influence on individuals' everyday lives, impact societal structures, and exert power beyond its immediate transactional or commercial boundaries. The BRAG2 consists of four concise sentence-completion items evaluated on a seven-point response scale. Psychometrically, the instrument demonstrates high internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha coefficients typically ranging between .88 and .93 across empirical investigations), a robust unidimensional factor structure confirmed via exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, and sound convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity. By operationalizing brand agency as an external source of systemic order, the scale explains why consumers experiencing personal control deficits disproportionately gravitate toward market-leading brands capable of restoring an overarching sense of structure and predictability.

Keywords

Brand Agency, BRAG2, Compensatory Control Theory, Mind Perception, Brand Leadership, Consumer Psychology, Anthropomorphism, Social Power, Perceived Efficacy, Psychometrics, Market Leadership

Authors

The Brand Agency (BRAG2) scale was conceptualized, operationalized, and validated by a team of consumer psychologists and marketing scholars:

• Joshua T. Beck — Associate Professor of Marketing, Lundquist College of Business, University of Oregon. Beck's research focuses on consumer behavior, identity, moral decision-making, and psychological control.
• Ryan Rahinel — Associate Professor of Marketing and Donald E. Weston Chair, Carl H. Lindner College of Business, University of Cincinnati. Rahinel investigates the cognitive and motivational underpinnings of consumer choice, resource scarcity, and compensatory mechanisms.
• Alexander Bleier — Associate Professor of Marketing, Frankfurt School of Finance & Management. Bleier specializes in digital marketing, customer relationship management, advertising effectiveness, and consumer-brand relationships.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Brand Agency (BRAG2) scale is to assess consumers' cognitive appraisals of a brand's broad societal power and capacity to affect the physical, social, and economic world. While conventional marketing psychometrics have long assessed constructs such as brand awareness, brand equity, perceived quality, and brand personality, these traditional metrics primarily treat the brand as a bundle of commercial attributes or an anthropomorphized partner in a dyadic interpersonal relationship. They typically fail to capture the macro-level systemic footprint that leading modern enterprises occupy in contemporary consciousness.

In consumer psychology, brands are frequently perceived not merely as purveyors of goods and services, but as powerful social actors capable of intervening in societal affairs, influencing public policy, altering cultural norms, and directing economic trajectories. Beck, Rahinel, and Bleier (2020) developed the BRAG2 scale to investigate the downstream consequences of these perceptions, specifically addressing how external psychological threats—such as the attenuation of personal control—influence consumer decision-making. According to compensatory control frameworks, when individuals perceive that their internal agency or mastery over their environment is threatened, they exhibit an elevated psychological need to affirm order, predictability, and stability through external entities, including governments, religious institutions, and overarching commercial organizations.

The BRAG2 scale addresses a critical methodological and theoretical void by isolating the "agency" dimension of brand perception from traditional "warmth" or "competence" dimensions. In experimental and applied research settings, the instrument allows scholars to determine:

• Whether a brand's market leadership translates directly into perceived societal agency;
• How perceptions of brand agency buffer against consumer feelings of vulnerability, randomness, and chaos;
• The boundary conditions under which high-agency brands are sought after (e.g., during existential threats, economic instability, or individual helplessness) versus when they are rejected due to perceived monopolistic overreach or ethical violations.

Psychological Construct

The psychological construct measured by the BRAG2 scale is Broad Societal Brand Agency. In classical social psychology and philosophy of action, agency denotes the capacity of an entity to act intentionally, exert will, formulate goals, and execute actions that produce measurable changes in its environment. When applied to consumer-brand interactions, brand agency represents a socio-cognitive attribution wherein the consumer views the corporate entity as an efficacious agent with macroscopic reach.

The construct comprises four core conceptual facets unified under a single structural dimension:

• Capacity to Shape World Outcomes: This facet captures the belief that the brand can alter macro-environmental realities. It reflects consumer perceptions that the brand's operational choices, innovations, and corporate behavior actively mold global or environmental states rather than merely responding to external conditions.
• Influence Over People's Lives: This dimension assesses the perceived depth and breadth of the brand's penetration into daily human existence. It measures the extent to which consumers recognize that the brand fundamentally structures, modifies, or directs the behaviors, routines, habits, and well-being of the populace.
• Societal Impact: Moving beyond individual consumer touchpoints, this facet gauges the degree to which the brand is seen as impacting societal structures, cultural dialogues, legal frameworks, and socio-economic systems.
• Influence Beyond the Commercial Domain: A pivotal distinction of this construct is that agency transcends selling products or dominating a financial ledger. It operationalizes the brand as a socio-political and cultural actor whose sway extends into domains traditionally governed by civic, governmental, or ideological institutions.

Importantly, brand agency is distinct from valence or moral goodness. An entity can be perceived as exceptionally high in agency while being perceived as morally benevolent, neutral, or malevolent. The BRAG2 specifically indexes the magnitude of perceived efficacy and potency, measuring the sheer capacity to govern outcomes rather than the warmth, benevolence, or ethical integrity with which that power is wielded.

Theoretical Framework

The conceptual foundation of the BRAG2 scale rests upon three intersecting theoretical paradigms in psychological science: Compensatory Control Theory, Mind Perception Theory, and the Stereotype Content Model.

Compensatory Control Theory

Formulated by Kay, Gaucher, Napier, Callan, and Laurin (2008), Compensatory Control Theory posits that human beings have a fundamental, non-negotiable psychological drive to perceive the world as orderly, coherent, and predictable, rather than random or chaotic. When individuals experience an internal loss of personal control—whether induced by socioeconomic shocks, natural disasters, random misfortune, or lab manipulations—they engage in compensatory mechanisms designed to re-establish environmental order. Crucially, this restoration does not need to stem from the self; individuals can satisfy this psychological imperative by aligning themselves with, or relying upon, external sources of control that are perceived to possess high agency, such as an omnipotent deity, a centralized government, or an authoritative institution.

Beck et al. (2020) extended this framework directly to consumer choice architectures. Large, market-leading brands often maintain infrastructure, supply chains, and market dominance that rival or exceed sovereign states. Consequently, when consumers feel a deficit in personal mastery, they demonstrate an enhanced preference for brand leaders because these entities serve as psychological proxies for order. The BRAG2 scale was engineered precisely to confirm this psychological mechanism: market leaders are favored under low personal control specifically because consumers attribute high external agency to them.

Mind Perception and Anthropomorphism

The cognitive basis for assigning agency to a non-human corporate entity derives from the Mind Perception Framework pioneered by Gray, Gray, and Wegner (2007). Their research reveals that human observers evaluate social entities along two independent, fundamental dimensions of mind:

1. Agency: The capacity for self-control, intention, planning, communication, and environmental efficacy.
2. Experience: The capacity to experience sensations, emotions, pain, pleasure, and consciousness.

While biological human beings are perceived as high in both agency and experience, institutions, algorithms, and corporations are routinely perceived as possessing high levels of agency but minimal experience. The BRAG2 scale captures this cognitive attribution, quantifying the extent to which consumers anthropomorphize brands as deliberate, willful entities capable of exerting top-down causal impact on their environment.

Validity

The BRAG2 instrument was subjected to empirical validation protocols across laboratory experiments and field studies reported by Beck, Rahinel, and Bleier (2020). The scale demonstrates construct, convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity.

Construct and Convergent Validity

Construct validity was established by administering the scale across a diverse portfolio of consumer goods and technological brands varying extensively in perceived market position (e.g., market leaders vs. niche/challenger brands). Brands with objective market-leader status consistently yielded statistically significant higher scores on the BRAG2 scale relative to non-leaders within the same product category (with mean differences consistently yielding moderate-to-large effect sizes, Cohen's d > 0.65). Convergent validity was further demonstrated through robust positive correlations with external measures of perceived institutional power, market dominance, and organizational capability.

Discriminant Validity

To establish that the BRAG2 scale measures a unique construct rather than general brand favorability or traditional brand competence, Beck et al. conducted discriminant analyses alongside the Stereotype Content Model's dimensions (Fiske, Cuddy, Glick, & Xu, 2002). While brand competence assesses an entity's ability to reliably deliver on its functional promises (e.g., "capable," "efficient," "skilled"), the BRAG2 captures broad societal influence beyond functional product performance. Statistical separation was verified via exploratory factor analysis and average variance extracted (AVE) assessments, wherein the variance extracted by the BRAG2 exceeded its shared variance with brand warmth, brand attitude, and functional quality.

Predictive and Nomological Validity

Nomological validity was demonstrated through mediation analyses testing the predictions of Compensatory Control Theory. In experimental studies, participants primed with low personal control exhibited a heightened preference for market-leading brands over challenger brands. Mediation modeling revealed that this shift was mediated by scores on the BRAG2 scale. When controlling for general brand liking, product quality, and perceived price, the BRAG2 uniquely explained the indirect effect of control threats on consumer choice, proving its predictive utility in applied experimental paradigms.

Reliability

The four-item BRAG2 scale exhibits internal consistency across varied respondent samples, encompassing undergraduate laboratory participants and diverse adult panels (e.g., Amazon Mechanical Turk, Prolific Academic).

• Internal Consistency: Across multiple empirical studies in Beck et al. (2020), Cronbach's alpha ($lpha$) coefficients consistently ranged from .88 to .93, substantially surpassing the standard psychometric cutoff of .70 recommended by Nunnally and Bernstein (1994).
• Composite Reliability: Confirmatory factor analytic evaluations demonstrate composite reliability (CR) values exceeding .89, underscoring strong internal cohesion among the four items.
• Average Variance Extracted (AVE): The AVE for the single latent factor consistently exceeds .65 (well above the Fornell-Larcker benchmark of .50), indicating that the scale captures genuine construct-relevant variance rather than measurement error.
• Item-Total Correlations: Corrected item-total correlations for each of the four indicators systematically exceed .72, demonstrating that each individual item contributes meaningfully to the overall score.

Factor Analysis

The structural dimensionality of the BRAG2 was scrutinized via exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis (EFA and CFA) in the development research. Theoretical expectations posited a strictly unidimensional construct reflecting general societal agency.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

Principal axis factoring and maximum likelihood extractions conducted across multiple consumer cohorts revealed an empirical single-factor solution:

• A single dominant factor emerged across all administrations, characterized by an eigenvalue substantially exceeding Kaiser's criterion of 1.0 (typical initial eigenvalues > 3.10).
• The primary factor accounts for over 75% to 82% of the total item variance.
• The scree plot displays an unmistakable elbow following the first component, with subsequent eigenvalues remaining below 0.35, verifying unidimensionality.
• Standardized factor pattern loadings across all four items remain high, universally loading between .82 and .92.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

When evaluated within a structural equation modeling (SEM) framework, the single-factor model exhibits goodness-of-fit indices that satisfy rigorous psychometric criteria:

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): > .985
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): > .975
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): < .055 (with 90% confidence intervals spanning .000 to .085)
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): < .025
• Chi-Square to Degrees of Freedom Ratio ($\chi^2/df$): < 2.20

Alternative two-factor formulations (e.g., partitioning items into individual-level impact vs. macro-societal impact) fail to improve model fit significantly and yield factor inter-correlations approaching unity ($r > .88$), corroborating the psychometric parsimony of the single-factor structure.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The Brand Agency (BRAG2) scale is structured as a sentence-completion instrument. The respondent is introduced to a focal brand stem followed by four incomplete sentences reflecting broad influence and systemic power.

• Test Type: Self-report psychometric scale (Cognitive attribution / Brand perception).
• Administration Format: Paper-and-pencil, computer-assisted self-interview (CASI), or mobile online survey.
• Item Count: 4 items.
• Item Presentation: Sentence-completion stems completed by evaluating the targeted brand.
• Response Scale: 7-point Likert scale (typically anchored from 1 = "Strongly Disagree" to 7 = "Strongly Agree").
• Estimated Completion Time: Under 1 minute (approximately 30 to 45 seconds).
• Scoring Protocol:
  • All 4 items are positively keyed; no reverse scoring is required.
  • An overall Brand Agency index is computed by calculating the arithmetic mean of the four responses:
    
    Brand Agency Score = (Item 1 + Item 2 + Item 3 + Item 4) / 4
  • Higher mean values (approaching 7) denote perceived high societal agency, characteristic of established market leaders and influential corporate entities. Lower mean values (approaching 1) indicate brands viewed as functionally constrained, niche, or devoid of macroscopic influence.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Brand Agency (BRAG2) scale was published in 2020 within the following peer-reviewed article:

Beck, Joshua T., Ryan Rahinel, and Alexander Bleier (2020). "Company Worth Keeping: Personal Control and Preferences for Brand Leaders." Journal of Consumer Research, 46(5), 871–886. DOI: 10.1093/jcr/ucz039

The scale was developed for academic behavioral science and is accessible in the public domain for non-commercial academic research under standard scholarly attribution conventions. Researchers wishing to deploy the BRAG2 scale in academic studies are generally free to do so provided appropriate citation is given to Beck, Rahinel, and Bleier (2020) and the Journal of Consumer Research. For proprietary, commercial, or consulting applications, users should consult the copyright guidelines of the publisher (Oxford University Press) and the original authors.

References

• Beck, J. T., Rahinel, R., & Bleier, A. (2020). Company worth keeping: Personal control and preferences for brand leaders. Journal of Consumer Research, 46(5), 871–886. https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucz039
• 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
• Fournier, S. (1998). Consumers and their brands: Developing relationship theory in consumer research. Journal of Consumer Research, 24(4), 343–373. https://doi.org/10.1086/209515
• Gray, H. M., Gray, K., & Wegner, D. M. (2007). Dimensions of mind perception. Science, 315(5812), 619. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1134475
• Kay, A. C., Gaucher, D., Napier, J. L., Callan, M. J., & Laurin, K. (2008). God and the government: Testing a compensatory control mechanism for the support of external systems. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95(1), 18–35. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.95.1.18
• Landau, M. J., Kay, A. C., & Whitson, J. A. (2015). Compensatory control and the appeal of a structured world. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 24(1), 69–74. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721414552593
• Nunnally, J. C., & Bernstein, I. H. (1994). Psychometric Theory (3rd ed.). McGraw-Hill.

Items of the Scale