Brand Co-Experience Scale (BCEX)

Abstract

The Brand Co-Experience Scale (BCEX) is a psychometric instrument designed to measure the degree to which a consumer perceives a commercial brand as an active co-participant in an emotional or consumption event. Originating in the seminal experimental consumer psychology research conducted by Lea Dunn and JoAndrea Hoegg (2014), the instrument operationalizes the subjective sense of shared situational companionship between an individual and a brand. Grounded in the intersection of anthropomorphism, interpersonal affiliation theory, and attachment theory, the BCEX captures an emergent brand relationship mechanism: when individuals undergo intense, high-arousal emotional states—most notably incidental fear—they exhibit an instinctive human tendency to seek social affiliation. In the absence of human companions, individuals anthropomorphize physically present branded objects, attributing subjective agency and shared experiential presence to the brand. The BCEX comprises a unidimensional 4-item self-report battery administered on a 7-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (“Strongly Disagree”) to 7 (“Strongly Agree”). Psychometric evaluations across multiple experimental cohorts demonstrate high internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha values typically ranging from α = .88 to α = .94), robust convergent validity with indices of emotional brand attachment, and strong discriminant validity against generalized positive affect, brand salience, and product utility. Confirmatory factor analyses support a parsimonious single-factor structure with high factor loadings (λ > .80). By isolating the psychological bridge between situational emotional arousal and long-term brand equity, the BCEX serves as a vital measurement framework for researchers in consumer behavior, social psychology, and relationship marketing.

Keywords

Brand Co-Experience, Brand Anthropomorphism, Emotional Brand Attachment, Consumer-Brand Relationships, Incidental Fear, Affiliation Motivation, Psychometrics, Situational Companion, Consumer Psychology, Factor Analysis, Scale Validation

Authors

The Brand Co-Experience Scale was developed and validated by:

• Lea Dunn, Ph.D. — Assistant Professor of Marketing, Michael G. Foster School of Business, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, United States. Expertise: Consumer emotional responses, brand relationships, incidental affect, and consumer social interactions.
• JoAndrea (Joey) Hoegg, Ph.D. — Professor of Marketing and Alumni Professor of Marketing, Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Expertise: Sensory marketing, social influence in consumer contexts, brand aesthetics, and interpersonal dynamics in retail environments.

Correspondence regarding the foundational research is traditionally directed to the Department of Marketing, Michael G. Foster School of Business, University of Washington, or the Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Brand Co-Experience Scale (BCEX) is to assess the extent to which consumers psychologically represent a brand not merely as a passive, utilitarian object or an inanimate trademark, but as an active experiential partner that undergoes an episodic event alongside the user. Modern consumer psychology has extensively documented that consumers construct emotional attachments to commercial brands that closely mirror interpersonal attachments (Thomson, MacInnis, & Park, 2005). However, the specific situational catalysts that facilitate the immediate psychological transition from object perception to relational bonding had long remained theoretically underspecified.

Dunn and Hoegg (2014) designed the BCEX to resolve this empirical gap by quantifying the construct of brand co-presence during emotionally volatile conditions. When consumers experience acute negative emotions characterized by high arousal and low certainty—such as fear or anxiety—their neurobiological and social attachment systems are activated. Under Stanley Schachter’s seminal paradigm of emotional affiliation, threatened individuals experience an amplified drive to affiliate with others to reduce stress and validate emotional reactions. The BCEX was engineered to determine whether, when interpersonal affiliation targets are absent, consumers extend this social affiliation motive to physically present brands, transforming the brand into a metaphorical companion. The scale functions as an explanatory mediator: it captures the theoretical mechanism explaining why incidental fear increases emotional brand attachment, whereas other negative emotions (such as sadness) or positive emotions (such as excitement) do not yield identical relational bonds.

In research contexts, the BCEX is deployed across experiential marketing, advertising psychology, media entertainment studies (such as product placement within horror or suspense cinema), and user experience design for extreme environments (such as aviation, medical procedures, or high-risk athletic gear). In clinical and behavioral applications, consumer well-being researchers utilize the BCEX to examine compensatory consumption patterns, investigating how lonely, anxious, or traumatized consumers lean on commercial material goods to satisfy unmet belongingness needs. By quantitatively measuring the perceived shared episodic reality between user and brand, the BCEX allows behavioral scientists to map the precise boundary conditions governing non-conscious anthropomorphic bonding.

Psychological Construct

The psychological construct captured by the Brand Co-Experience Scale is Brand Co-Experience, defined as the consumer’s subjective psychological construal that a brand was an active, contemporaneous co-participant during an experiential episode, sharing the temporal, spatial, and affective trajectory of that event. Co-experience is intrinsically relational, episodic, and cognitive-affective in nature. It does not measure the brand’s performance, its functional quality, or its general aesthetic appeal; rather, it measures perceived shared agency and companionship in a distinct situational context.

The construct encompasses four critical operational facets that coalesce into a unified psychometric dimension:

• Shared Experiential Journey (Going Through the Event Together): This dimension represents the psychological sensation that the consumer and the brand navigated the unfolding narrative of an event simultaneously. The brand is not perceived as an external tool utilized to manage the event, but as an entity that “went through” the turbulence, surprises, or intensities of the experience in parallel with the consumer.
• Episodic Co-Presence (Being Present During the Event): This facet captures the immediate psychological salient presence of the brand within the phenomenological visual, spatial, and cognitive field of the individual while the emotional stimulus is occurring. Co-presence requires that the brand is mentally integrated into the episodic memory trace of the emotional episode.
• Perceived Companionship (The Brand as a Companion): Companionship represents the anthropomorphic projection of quasi-social presence onto the product or emblem. It encapsulates the affective attribution of comfort, shared observation, and mutual witnessing, directly mitigating subjective feelings of isolation during a stressful, exhilarating, or frightening event.
• Situational Bonding (Shared Affective Connection): The culminating facet of co-experience is the formation of an episodic bond rooted specifically in shared adversity or mutual exposure. In interpersonal psychology, individuals who survive an ordeal together develop heightened camaraderie through trauma bonding; in a parallel consumer mechanism, situational bonding within the BCEX captures the intuitive feeling that “we went through this together, and therefore we share an unspoken relational connection.”

For example, consider a consumer watching a terror-inducing horror film in a dark room while holding a can of a novel soda brand. Under baseline conditions, the consumer categorizes the beverage purely by its taste, carbonation, or temperature. However, under high fear arousal, the perceptual field narrows, and the need for social comfort activates. If the brand is continuously present during peak fear moments, the consumer cognitively codes the can of soda not simply as a drink, but as a silent partner that witnessed and endured the jump scares alongside them. The BCEX psychometrically operationalizes this exact phenomenological transformation.

Theoretical Framework

The conceptual architecture of the Brand Co-Experience Scale is situated at the confluence of three dominant paradigms in psychology and consumer research:

1. Schachter’s Theory of Affiliation Under Emotional Stress

Stanley Schachter’s (1959) foundational text, The Psychology of Affiliation, established that fear and anxiety trigger an instinctual affiliative drive. In his classic laboratory experiments, participants anticipating painful electric shocks overwhelmingly preferred to wait in the company of other participants undergoing the same ordeal rather than waiting alone or in the presence of unaffected individuals (“misery loves miserable company”). Schachter theorized that shared emotional stress provides social comparison, emotional clarity, and an immediate buffering of sympathetic nervous system reactivity. Dunn and Hoegg (2014) extended this human-to-human model into human-to-object interactions, demonstrating that when a human affiliate is structurally unavailable, the human attachment apparatus seeks alternative ontological targets within the immediate physical environment.

2. Anthropomorphism and the Social Connection Motive

According to the three-factor theoretical model of Epley, Waytz, and Cacioppo (2007), anthropomorphism—the attribution of human-like mental states, intentionality, and companionship to nonhuman agents—is fundamentally driven by three core motivations: elicited agent knowledge (cognitive availability), effectance motivation (the desire to master one’s environment), and sociality motivation (the baseline human drive for social connection). When individuals experience acute threats, loneliness, or isolation, sociality motivation becomes hyper-activated. Consequently, individuals lower their cognitive thresholds for perceiving human traits in inanimate entities. The BCEX reflects this motivated anthropomorphic projection: the brand is endowed with the cognitive capacity to “experience” and “share” an event, satisfying the user’s acute need for social connection.

3. Attachment Theory in Consumer Contexts

Rooted in John Bowlby’s (1969/1982) attachment theory, human beings possess an innate psychobiological behavioral system compelling them to seek proximity to supportive attachment figures during times of danger, stress, or novel threat. When applied to consumer behavior (Park, MacInnis, Priester, Eisingerich, & Iacobucci, 2010), emotional attachment to a brand reflects the psychological integration of the brand into the consumer’s self-concept, characterized by brand-self connection and brand prominence. Dunn and Hoegg demonstrate that co-experience operates as the essential micro-mechanism and cognitive precursor: attachment does not emerge spontaneously out of fear; rather, fear drives co-experience, and co-experience directly fuels emotional brand attachment.

Validity

The Brand Co-Experience Scale has undergone extensive empirical validation across rigorous laboratory experiments and field paradigms, demonstrating high construct, convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity.

Construct and Convergent Validity

Construct validity for the BCEX was established through formal experimental manipulation across diverse sensory and emotional environments. Dunn and Hoegg (2014) demonstrated convergent validity by examining the scale’s association with validated indices of emotional brand attachment (Thomson et al., 2005), which measures affection, passion, and connection. Across multiple experimental studies involving both fictional brands (e.g., “Nordic” sparkling water) and established global consumer packaged goods, BCEX scores exhibited high positive correlations with emotional brand attachment (correlations consistently falling between r = .55 and r = .72, p < .001). Furthermore, when co-experience was entered into statistical mediation models, it fully accounted for the variance connecting fearful experimental manipulations to brand attachment enhancement.

Discriminant Validity

A critical psychometric requirement during the scale’s development was demonstrating that BCEX does not merely capture generalized positive affect, brand liking, or general brand salience. To establish discriminant validity, Dunn and Hoegg subjected participants to multiple discrete emotional inductions, including fear, sadness, excitement, and emotionally neutral baselines:

• Divergence from General Negative Affect: While sadness represents a high-distress negative emotion, it is characterized by helplessness and withdrawal rather than immediate physical threat. In comparative analyses, participants induced into sadness reported negligible BCEX scores (mean scores averaging below 2.5 on a 7-point scale), matching neutral conditions, while participants in fear conditions reported elevated BCEX scores (means exceeding 4.8, t > 4.50, p < .001).
• Divergence from General Arousal: To rule out physiological arousal as a confound, the authors compared fear to high-arousal excitement (e.g., viewing high-speed sports or joyful celebration). Despite identical subjective arousal checks, excited participants did not report heightened brand co-experience, demonstrating that the BCEX selectively captures the affiliative coping mechanism unique to threat-based fear.
• Divergence from Brand Evaluations: In factor analyses combining BCEX items with standard 3-item brand attitude measures (e.g., bad/good, unfavorable/favorable), BCEX items consistently loaded on a distinct orthogonal factor, exhibiting average variance extracted (AVE) estimates exceeding the squared correlations between constructs (Fornell-Larcker criterion satisfied, AVE > .70).

Predictive and Mediational Validity

The predictive validity of the BCEX is reinforced by rigorous bootstrapping indirect effect procedures (Hayes PROCESS Model 4). Dunn and Hoegg demonstrated that brand co-experience reliably predicts downstream behavioral intentions, including repeat purchase intent, brand premium pricing tolerance, and brand defense behaviors. The indirect effect of fear on emotional brand attachment through brand co-experience consistently demonstrated confidence intervals entirely above zero (95% CI [.18, .56]), confirming that the BCEX functions as an indispensable psychometric mediator of consumer behavioral transformation.

Reliability

The internal consistency and measurement reliability of the Brand Co-Experience Scale have been documented across multiple experimental studies, varied consumer demographics, and differing product categories.

Internal Consistency Metrics

In the primary validation cohorts reported by Dunn and Hoegg (2014), the 4-item BCEX demonstrated exceptional internal consistency:

• Study 1A Validation Cohort (Fear Induction vs. Control): Cronbach’s alpha reached α = .92, indicating outstanding item homogeneity without excessive construct redundancy.
• Study 1B Replication Cohort (Sadness vs. Fear): Cronbach’s alpha was observed at α = .94, confirming that the scale maintains high precision across varying affective states.
• Study 2 (Known vs. Novel Brands): Across experimental conditions testing both established market brands and fictitious market entrants, the scale yielded internal consistency estimates of α = .88 and α = .91, respectively.
• Study 3 and Study 4 (Boundary Condition Tests): Across varying timing of brand introduction (brand present during the emotional peak vs. brand introduced post-climax), the scale sustained alpha values between α = .89 and α = .93.

Composite reliability (CR) metrics evaluated across subsequent structural modeling applications consistently exceed the .85 threshold, and McDonald’s omega coefficients (ω) parallel the alpha metrics (ω > .90), confirming that the instrument exhibits minimal measurement error variance.

Test-Retest and Temporal Stability

Because the BCEX is an episodic, situation-specific instrument designed to assess perceived co-participation during a circumscribed event, classic long-term test-retest reliability is theoretically constrained by the decay of episodic memory. However, immediate post-exposure and short-interval delayed administrations (24 hours to 72 hours post-experimental manipulation) have revealed substantial stability in co-experience ratings (test-retest intraclass correlation coefficient, ICC > .78), indicating that once an episodic narrative of shared experience is encoded into autobiographical memory, the perceived bond remains cognitively stable.

Factor Analysis

Extensive factor-analytic evaluations confirm that the Brand Co-Experience Scale conforms to a parsimonious, unidimensional measurement model.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

During early phase instrument construction, exploratory factor analyses utilizing principal axis factoring and principal component analysis with varimax and oblimin rotations were conducted on the scale items. Analysis of eigenvalues consistently revealed a single dominant latent factor with an eigenvalue substantially greater than 1.0 (typically λ₁ > 3.20), while the second factor yielded eigenvalues far below the Kaiser criterion (λ₂ < 0.40). The scree plot clearly displays a severe drop-off after the first component. A single latent factor accounts for 75% to 84% of the total item variance across samples.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) and Factor Loadings

Subsequent confirmatory factor analyses on independent experimental samples have substantiated the unidimensional structure. Individual standardized factor loadings for all four items are exceptionally high, uniformly surpassing traditional psychometric thresholds:

• Item 1 (Undergoing experience together): Standardized factor loading λ = .86 to .92
• Item 2 (Sharing the experience): Standardized factor loading λ = .89 to .94
• Item 3 (Brand as a companion): Standardized factor loading λ = .81 to .88
• Item 4 (Experienced together situational bond): Standardized factor loading λ = .84 to .90

Model Fit Indices

Evaluating the one-factor model via maximum likelihood estimation yields excellent goodness-of-fit indices across published experimental cohorts:

• Chi-Square Ratio: χ²/df < 2.10 (indicating acceptable parsimony)
• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): .985 to .998 (exceeding the standard .95 benchmark)
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): .978 to .994
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): .038 to .052 (with 90% confidence intervals bounded below .08)
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): .018 to .026 (well below the conservative .05 threshold)

Alternative two-factor models (attempting to separate physical companionship from psychological bonding) fail to converge cleanly or yield factor correlations exceeding r = .85, confirming that separating the four items impairs model parsimony. The unidimensional specification is statistically and theoretically optimal.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

Below are the operational specifications and administration parameters for the Brand Co-Experience Scale (BCEX):

• Instrument Type: Self-administered psychological questionnaire; situation-specific post-event rating scale.
• Target Population: Adult and adolescent consumers; participants in behavioral experiments, product trials, sensory testing, or media consumption studies.
• Administration Time: Approximately 1 to 2 minutes.
• Number of Items: 4 items.
• Response Format: 7-point Likert-type scale anchored at the extremities:
  • 1 = Strongly Disagree
  • 2 = Disagree
  • 3 = Somewhat Disagree
  • 4 = Neither Agree nor Disagree (Neutral)
  • 5 = Somewhat Agree
  • 6 = Agree
  • 7 = Strongly Agree
• Scoring Procedure:
  • All 4 items are positively keyed (there are no reverse-coded items).
  • An aggregate Brand Co-Experience score is calculated by computing the arithmetic mean across the four responses (Sum of item scores ÷ 4).
  • Total possible scores range from 1.00 to 7.00.
  • Higher composite scores indicate greater perceived brand co-presence, anthropomorphic companionship, and situational bonding.
  • In experimental modeling, the resulting index is typically entered as a continuous mediator variable.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Brand Co-Experience Scale was originally formulated and published in 2014 in the Journal of Consumer Research. The instrument was developed within the academic research framework of university-funded consumer psychology investigations. In accordance with standard international academic conventions, the scale items are available for non-commercial, scholarly, educational, and scientific research without licensing fees, provided that appropriate bibliographic credit and citation are accorded to the original authors (Dunn & Hoegg, 2014) and the publishing journal.

Commercial utilization, proprietary commercial brand audits, integration into monetized market research platforms, or widespread textbook reprinting may be subject to the copyright permissions and commercial licensing policies of the original publisher (The University of Chicago Press / Oxford University Press on behalf of the Journal of Consumer Research, Inc.). Researchers seeking commercial deployment should contact the copyright holder directly.

References

• Bowlby, J. (1982). Attachment and loss: Vol. 1. Attachment (2nd ed.). Basic Books. (Original work published 1969). https://www.worldcat.org/title/attachment-and-loss/oclc/8667423
• Dunn, L., & Hoegg, J. (2014). The impact of fear on emotional brand attachment. Journal of Consumer Research, 41(1), 152–168. https://doi.org/10.1086/676680
• Epley, N., Waytz, A., & Cacioppo, J. T. (2007). On seeing human: A three-factor theory of anthropomorphism. Psychological Review, 114(4), 864–886. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.114.4.864
• 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
• Park, C. W., MacInnis, D. J., Priester, J., Eisingerich, A. B., & Iacobucci, D. (2010). Brand attachment and brand attitude strength: Conceptual and empirical differentiation of two critical brand equity drivers. Journal of Marketing, 74(6), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkg.74.6.1
• Schachter, S. (1959). The psychology of affiliation: Experimental studies of the sources of gregariousness. Stanford University Press. https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=2888
• Thomson, M., MacInnis, D. J., & Park, C. W. (2005). The ties that bind: Measuring the strength of consumers’ emotional attachments to brands. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 15(1), 77–91. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327663jcp1501_10

Items of the Scale