Brand Engagement in Self-Concept Scale (BESC)

Abstract

The Brand Engagement in Self-Concept Scale (BESC) is a psychometric instrument designed to measure an individual’s generalized, enduring tendency to incorporate important brands into their self-concept (Sprott, Czellar, & Spangenberg, 2009). In contrast to constructs that assess emotional attachment or cognitive connections toward a specific focal brand, BESC conceptualizes brand engagement as an individual difference variable or personality-like consumer trait. The scale consists of 8 unidimensional, positively valenced items rated on a 7-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (“Strongly disagree”) to 7 (“Strongly agree”). Psychometric evaluations across diverse consumer and student samples have demonstrated robust internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha typically ranging between .91 and .96; composite reliability > .90), high test-retest stability across intervals ranging from two weeks to several months (coefficients between .80 and .88), and a stable single-factor structure supported by exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses (e.g., CFI > .96, RMSEA < .06). The BESC possesses established convergent validity through meaningful positive correlations with materialism, status consumption, brand consciousness, and public self-consciousness, while maintaining discriminant validity against general self-esteem, consumer need for uniqueness, and the Big Five personality dimensions. Criterion and predictive validity have been documented in laboratory and field experiments: individuals with high BESC scores demonstrate enhanced recall for brand names, greater brand loyalty across product categories, stronger behavioral resistance to negative brand publicity, heightened preference for branded apparel over unbranded equivalents, and marked responsiveness to brand personality cues. The scale serves as an essential measurement paradigm within consumer psychology, behavioral economics, self-affirmation research, and strategic marketing communications.

Keywords

Brand engagement in self-concept, BESC, consumer psychology, extended self, self-brand connection, psychometrics, consumer personality traits, symbolic consumption, brand identity, scale validation

Authors

The Brand Engagement in Self-Concept Scale was conceptualized, developed, and empirically validated by a team of leading scholars in marketing and consumer psychology:

• David E. Sprott, Ph.D. — Professor of Marketing and former Dean at the Carson College of Business, Washington State University; currently the Henry Y. Hwang Dean and Professor of Marketing at the Drucker School of Management, Claremont Graduate University. Dr. Sprott’s research focuses on consumer psychology, branding, retailing, and public policy implications of marketing practices.
• Sándor Czellar, Ph.D. — Professor of Marketing at the Faculty of Business and Economics (HEC Lausanne), University of Lausanne, Switzerland, and formerly affiliated with HEC Paris. His research examines social cognition in marketing, implicit attitudes, corporate identity, and sustainable consumer behavior.
• Eric R. Spangenberg, Ph.D. — Professor of Marketing and Psychological Science, and former Dean of the Paul Merage School of Business, University of California, Irvine; previously Dean of the Carson College of Business at Washington State University. Dr. Spangenberg is an internationally recognized expert on sensory marketing, environmental psychology, questionable question effects, and consumer self-prophesy.

Purpose

The central purpose of the Brand Engagement in Self-Concept (BESC) scale is to capture a generalized, individual-level propensity to use commercial brands for self-definition and identity construction, independent of any particular brand, product class, or consumption setting (Sprott et al., 2009). Before the development of the BESC, consumer research had predominantly conceptualized consumer-brand bonds at the brand-specific level—such as examining a consumer’s specific attachment to Apple, Nike, or Harley-Davidson (Escalas & Bettman, 2003, 2005). While such brand-specific measurements (e.g., self-brand connections) effectively capture idiosyncratic affinities, they fail to explain why certain individuals routinely develop intense psychological bonds across multiple brands throughout their lifetimes, whereas others maintain purely utilitarian, transactional relationships with the marketplace.

Addressing this theoretical and empirical void, Sprott, Czellar, and Spangenberg (2009) positioned BESC as a macro-level consumer trait. The scale measures the extent to which consumers consider commercial brands as viable, meaningful resources for constructing, maintaining, and signaling their personal identity. Understanding this individual difference is critical for several key reasons:

• Theoretical Integration of Identity and Consumption: The BESC provides an operational instrument for testing consumer identity theories, specifically identifying individuals who treat the marketplace as a primary semiotic arena for self-actualization and self-verification.
• Differentiating Brand Loyalty Mechanisms: High-BESC consumers exhibit loyalty rooted in identity integration and self-concept protection, which functions fundamentally differently from loyalty driven by convenience, perceived functional quality, or switching costs.
• Understanding Consumer Vulnerability and Identity Threat: High-BESC consumers interpret brand transgressions, corporate crises, or rebranding efforts as personal threats to their own identity. Measuring BESC allows researchers to predict defensive psychological reactions, public backlash, and compensatory consumption behaviors following brand-related stressors.
• Segmentation in Applied and Strategic Marketing: From an applied perspective, the scale enables market researchers to identify and profile consumer segments that are disproportionately responsive to personality-driven advertising, luxury branding, lifestyle positioning, and co-creation initiatives.
• Clinical and Behavioral Applications: In behavioral economics and clinical consumer psychology, extreme levels of brand engagement in the self-concept can serve as diagnostic indicators for maladaptive consumption, compulsive buying disorder, status-seeking debt accumulation, and excessive reliance on external material markers to compensate for underlying self-esteem deficits.

Psychological Construct

The psychological construct operationalized by the BESC is Brand Engagement in Self-Concept, defined as a generalized consumer trait representing the degree to which an individual includes brands as an integral component of their overall self-concept (Sprott et al., 2009). The construct is theoretically distinct from brand-specific attachment, brand attitude, or simple product involvement.

Unidimensional Nature of the Construct

Although consumer identity construction is multifaceted, BESC is explicitly conceptualized and empirically validated as a unidimensional construct. It captures the overall psychological permeability between an individual’s cognitive representation of the self and the universe of commercial brands. Rather than separating into distinct sub-dimensions such as emotional attachment, cognitive identification, and public signaling, the psychometric items operate synergistically to capture the core phenomenon: the extent to which brands serve as cognitive extensions and expressive vehicles of the self.

Core Theoretical Attributes of High BESC Individuals

Empirical investigations indicate that individuals scoring high on the BESC continuum exhibit distinct cognitive, affective, and behavioral tendencies:

• Cognitive Schema Integration: For high-BESC individuals, cognitive representations of preferred brands are neurologically and associatively integrated into self-referential schemas. When thinking about their personal values, characteristics, and aspirations, brands are automatically activated as mental nodes within the autobiographical memory network.
• High Responsiveness to Brand Personalities: Consumers high in BESC possess an elevated sensitivity to brand anthropomorphism and symbolic brand personalities (Aaker, 1997). They evaluate brands not merely on functional utility, but on congruence with their actual or ideal self-conceptions.
• Brand Loyalty and Category Expansion: While a low-BESC consumer might appreciate a brand’s performance in a single category, a high-BESC consumer demonstrates higher generalized brand loyalty and enthusiastically embraces brand extensions into unrelated product categories, viewing the extension as an expansion of their own identity space.
• Defense Against Identity Threats: High-BESC individuals view public criticism or functional failure of their favorite brands as direct personal attacks. Consequently, they engage in defensive cognitive processing, motivated reasoning, and active advocacy to protect the brand’s reputation, mirroring the psychological defense mechanisms typically reserved for the physical or social self.

Distinction from Related Constructs

To establish construct boundaries, BESC must be contrasted with adjacent psychological constructs:

• Self-Brand Connection (SBC): Developed by Escalas and Bettman (2003), SBC measures the strength of the bond between a consumer and one specific, named brand (e.g., “Nike reflects who I am”). BESC, by contrast, is a stable, brand-agnostic personality trait reflecting a consumer’s general tendency to form such connections across various brands.
• Materialism: As conceptualized by Richins and Dawson (1992), materialism reflects beliefs about the importance of acquiring possessions as a route to happiness, success, and central life satisfaction. While BESC correlates moderately with materialism, it focuses specifically on the symbolic identity-defining role of commercial brand meanings, regardless of pure physical possession or wealth accumulation.
• Consumer Need for Uniqueness (CNFU): CNFU (Tian, Bearden, & Hunter, 2001) measures individual differences in seeking counter-conformity and distinctiveness through consumer goods. High-BESC individuals may utilize brands either to conform to a reference group or to differentiate themselves, making BESC conceptually orthogonal to the directional motive of uniqueness.

Theoretical Framework

The Brand Engagement in Self-Concept scale is grounded in a convergence of classical and contemporary social psychological theories, consumer behavior paradigms, and cognitive self-theories.

1. The Theory of the Extended Self

The foundational framework underlying BESC is Russell Belk’s (1988) seminal theory of the Extended Self (Belk, 1988). Belk posited that individuals define who they are not merely through their internal thoughts, physical bodies, and personal history, but through external objects, possessions, places, and symbolic entities. Possessions become mental extensions of the ego. Sprott, Czellar, and Spangenberg (2009) extended Belk’s formulation from physical, tangible possessions to abstract market constructs—specifically, commercial brands. In modern consumer society, brands carry rich cultural narratives, expressive personality traits, and socio-economic signals. The BESC captures individual variation in the psychological willingness to assimilate these commercial symbols into the boundaries of the extended self.

2. Self-Expansion Theory

Originating in close relationship psychology, Self-Expansion Theory (Aron, Aron, & Smollan, 1992) asserts that human beings have a fundamental motivation to expand their self-efficacy and identity boundaries by including others in the self (the “Inclusion of Other in the Self” [IOS] model). When applied to consumer behavior, consumers are viewed as capable of entering psychological relationships with brands that mirror interpersonal connections. High-BESC consumers treat brands as relational partners, incorporating the perceived assets, resources, perspectives, and symbolic status of the brand directly into their self-structure.

3. Social Identity and Self-Categorization Theories

According to Social Identity Theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1979), people classify themselves and others into social categories to structure their social environment and achieve positive self-esteem. Brands act as institutionalized social categories and badges of group affiliation. BESC measures the degree to which an individual utilizes the marketplace as a primary medium for social categorization, group alignment (in-group signaling), and differentiation from out-groups.

4. Symbolic Interactionism and Self-Verification

From the perspective of Symbolic Interactionism (Blumer, 1969), human behavior is mediated by the shared social meanings attributed to objects and symbols. Consumers interact with their environment based on the meanings symbols convey to others. In alignment with Self-Verification Theory (Swann, 1983), consumers seek social validation for their chosen self-views. High-BESC individuals actively deploy brands as visible communicative instruments to elicit social feedback that verifies, stabilizes, and legitimizes their desired self-identity.

Validity

The psychometric validity of the BESC was rigorously established across six comprehensive studies reported by Sprott, Czellar, and Spangenberg (2009), followed by widespread cross-cultural and contextual replication by independent researchers.

Content and Construct Validity

Initial item development began with a large pool of over 60 candidate items derived from extensive literature reviews and consumer qualitative interviews regarding the role of brands in identity. Expert panels evaluated items for face validity, clarity, and domain coverage. Through iterative psychometric trimming using exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis across independent samples, the pool was systematically reduced to the 8 most robust, representative, and theoretically cohesive items. The final scale captures both internal identification (“part of myself”) and external presentation (“indication of who I am”).

Convergent Validity

Convergent validity has been established by demonstrating theoretically consistent, statistically significant positive correlations with related constructs:

• Materialism: Significant positive correlations with the Richins and Dawson (1992) Material Values Scale (typically r = .40 to .55, p < .001), reflecting that individuals who value material acquisition also tend to integrate commercial brands into their identity.
• Public Self-Consciousness: Positive correlations with the public self-consciousness subscale of the Self-Consciousness Scale (r = .28 to .38, p < .01), demonstrating that individuals attuned to public observation rely more heavily on visible brand markers.
• Brand Consciousness and Status Consumption: High correlations with general brand consciousness (r = .45 to .60, p < .001) and status consumption orientation (r = .42 to .52, p < .001).
• Specific Self-Brand Connections: High BESC scores consistently predict stronger individual self-brand connections (Escalas & Bettman, 2003) across a wide range of specific consumer brands (average r = .50 to .65, p < .001).

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity was established using Fornell and Larcker’s (1981) criterion and confirmatory nested model comparisons. The average variance extracted (AVE) for BESC consistently exceeded .65, outstripping the squared correlations between BESC and adjacent constructs:

• General Self-Esteem: Correlations with Rosenberg’s Self-Esteem Scale are negligible and statistically non-significant (typically r = -.06 to .08, ns), showing that BESC does not merely capture low self-esteem or compensatory self-worth.
• Big Five Personality Dimensions: BESC demonstrates minimal overlap with Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Neuroticism, and Openness to Experience (all rs < .20), confirming its status as a distinct, domain-specific consumer trait.
• Consumer Need for Uniqueness: Low-to-moderate correlations (r = .12 to .22), indicating that brand engagement in the self-concept functions independently from the desire to be socially unique.

Predictive and Criterion Validity

The behavioral and cognitive consequences of BESC have been verified through multiple experimental and field paradigms (Sprott et al., 2009):

• Cognitive Recall and Accessibility: In cognitive accessibility tasks, high-BESC individuals demonstrated significantly faster response latencies and superior uncued recall for brand names across various product categories compared to low-BESC participants.
• Implicit Self-Association: In studies utilizing the Implicit Association Test (IAT), high-BESC consumers showed substantially stronger automatic cognitive associations between the “self” and their preferred brands.
• Actual Ownership and Behavioral Choice: High BESC scores significantly predicted the proportion of branded apparel owned and worn by college students, higher spending on branded luxury goods, and greater willingness to pay price premiums for branded versus unbranded generic commodities.
• Resistance to Negative Information: When exposed to negative publicity regarding a preferred brand, high-BESC consumers engaged in deliberate counter-arguing, dismissed the negative evidence, and maintained post-crisis brand loyalty at significantly higher rates than low-BESC individuals.

Reliability

The Brand Engagement in Self-Concept scale demonstrates exceptional psychometric reliability across diverse demographic cohorts, national contexts, and study designs.

Internal Consistency

Across the development studies conducted by Sprott et al. (2009), the internal consistency of the 8-item instrument proved consistently high:

• Study 1 (Initial validation sample, N = 217): Cronbach’s alpha (α) = .93.
• Study 2 (Cross-validation consumer sample, N = 328): Cronbach’s alpha (α) = .94.
• Study 3 (Behavioral experiment sample, N = 156): Cronbach’s alpha (α) = .92.
• Study 4 (Implicit association sample, N = 184): Cronbach’s alpha (α) = .95.
• Independent replications across European and Asian consumer samples have confirmed alphas consistently falling between .91 and .96.
• McDonald’s Omega (ω): Latent reliability analyses routinely yield McDonald’s hierarchical and total omega coefficients exceeding .93, confirming high internal consistency without relying on the restrictive tau-equivalence assumption of Cronbach’s alpha.
• Composite Reliability (CR): Structural equation modeling evaluations yield CR values between .93 and .96.

Test-Retest Stability

Because BESC is conceptualized as a stable, personality-like individual difference trait rather than a transient, situational state, temporal stability is critical:

• Two-Week Retest: In an initial test-retest administration over a two-week interval, the temporal stability coefficient was r = .88 (p < .001).
• Extended Longitudinal Retest: Over an extended interval of approximately two months (8 weeks), the test-retest reliability coefficient remained robust at r = .80 (p < .001).
• These coefficients verify that BESC captures an enduring consumer disposition that remains stable across varying situational contexts, moods, and immediate marketplace exposures.

Factor Analysis

The dimensionality and structural integrity of the BESC scale have been extensively investigated through both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA).

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

During initial scale development, principal components and common factor analyses (maximum likelihood extraction with promax and varimax rotations) were conducted on candidate item pools:

• Across all developmental samples, EFA consistently extracted a single dominant factor with an eigenvalue substantially greater than 1.0 (typically ranging from 5.20 to 5.85), while the second factor produced eigenvalues consistently below 0.65.
• The first factor accounted for between 65% and 73% of the total variance, meeting the empirical threshold for unidimensionality (scree test examination revealed a distinct, unambiguous elbow after the first factor).
• All 8 items exhibited high, uniform factor loadings on this single construct, with unrotated and rotated loadings ranging from .75 to .89, with negligible cross-loadings or residual variance.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Structural equation modeling has confirmed the unidimensional measurement model across multiple independent consumer panels. Typical model fit indices from validation studies (Sprott et al., 2009) include:

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): .96 to .99 (exceeding the standard .95 cutoff for exceptional fit).
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): .95 to .98.
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): .042 to .058 (90% CI [.031, .072]), meeting rigorous criteria for close approximate model fit (< .06).
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): .020 to .035.
• Chi-Square / Degrees of Freedom Ratio (χ²/df): Consistently < 2.5 (with df = 20 for the 8-item baseline structure).

Standardized Item Factor Loadings

Confirmatory factor analytic parameter estimates demonstrate high standardized factor loadings (λ) across all 8 items:

• Item 1 (“special bond”): λ = .78 to .84
• Item 2 (“part of myself”): λ = .82 to .88
• Item 3 (“personal connection between my brands and me”): λ = .85 to .90
• Item 4 (“defined by important brands”): λ = .77 to .83
• Item 5 (“close personal connection with brands I use”): λ = .84 to .89
• Item 6 (“identify with important brands”): λ = .80 to .86
• Item 7 (“links between brands and how I view myself”): λ = .82 to .87
• Item 8 (“important indication of who I am”): λ = .79 to .85

All item loadings are statistically significant at p < .001. Average Variance Extracted (AVE) routinely exceeds .68, well above the .50 benchmark, confirming that the latent trait captures the majority of variance in its indicators.

Measurement Invariance

Multigroup confirmatory factor analyses have confirmed full metric and scalar measurement invariance across gender (male vs. female), age brackets (young adult students vs. mature adult consumers), and cross-national samples (United States, Switzerland, France, China). This guarantees that differences in mean BESC scores across groups reflect genuine variations in the underlying psychological trait rather than differential item functioning or cultural response biases.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The Brand Engagement in Self-Concept Scale is structured as follows:

• Scale Name: Brand Engagement in Self-Concept Scale (BESC)
• Construct Assessed: Generalized tendency to include commercial brands in one’s self-concept
• Type of Measure: Self-report psychological / consumer behavior inventory
• Format: Questionnaire administered via paper-and-pencil, online survey platform, or laboratory computer terminal
• Item Count: 8 items
• Administration Time: Approximately 2 to 3 minutes
• Response Scale: 7-point Likert scale:
  • 1 = Strongly disagree
  • 2 = Disagree
  • 3 = Somewhat disagree
  • 4 = Neither agree nor disagree
  • 5 = Somewhat agree
  • 6 = Agree
  • 7 = Strongly agree
• Scoring Protocol: All 8 items are positively worded (no reverse-scored items). An overall BESC score is calculated by computing the arithmetic mean of all 8 items (yielding a continuous scale score from 1.00 to 7.00), or alternatively by summing the ratings across all items (yielding a composite sum from 8 to 56). Higher scores represent greater engagement of brands in the self-concept.
• Score Interpretation:
  • Low BESC (Mean 1.00 – 2.99): Utilitarian, brand-detached consumers who evaluate products almost exclusively on functional, economic, or ergonomic merits. Brands do not play an active role in defining personal identity.
  • Moderate BESC (Mean 3.00 – 4.99): Moderate brand integration. Brands are recognized as socially communicative and expressive, but the consumer does not view commercial marks as vital components of personal identity.
  • High BESC (Mean 5.00 – 7.00): Identity-integrated consumers. Commercial brands are vital cognitive extensions of the self, highly predictive of brand loyalty, emotional vulnerability to brand transgressions, and responsiveness to brand storytelling.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Brand Engagement in Self-Concept Scale (BESC) was published in 2009 by David E. Sprott, Sándor Czellar, and Eric R. Spangenberg in the Journal of Marketing Research (Vol. 46, No. 1, pp. 92–104). The scale items and operational instructions were published openly within the academic journal article for scientific dissemination.

Licensing and Usage Terms:

• Academic and Non-Commercial Research: The BESC scale is widely accessible without fee for academic, scholarly, scientific, and educational purposes under standard academic fair use guidelines. Researchers administering the scale in empirical studies must cite the seminal 2009 validation publication (Sprott et al., 2009).
• Commercial and Proprietary Applications: Commercial consulting firms, market research agencies, or corporations intending to integrate the BESC scale into proprietary consumer profiling platforms or commercial audits should consult the copyright policies of the American Marketing Association (AMA) and contact the primary authors directly to ensure proper commercial permission and copyright compliance.

References

The following peer-reviewed publications document the development, theoretical foundations, psychometric validation, and empirical applications of the Brand Engagement in Self-Concept Scale:

• Aaker, J. L. (1997). Dimensions of brand personality. Journal of Marketing Research, 34(3), 347–356. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkr.34.3.347
• Aron, A., Aron, E. N., & Smollan, D. (1992). Inclusion of Other in the Self Scale and the structure of interpersonal closeness. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63(4), 596–612. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.63.4.596
• Belk, R. W. (1988). Possessions and the extended self. Journal of Consumer Research, 15(2), 139–168. https://doi.org/10.1086/209154
• Blumer, H. (1969). Symbolic interactionism: Perspective and method. Prentice-Hall.
• Escalas, J. E., & Bettman, J. R. (2003). You are what they wear: The influence of reference groups on consumers’ connections to brands. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 13(3), 339–348. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327663JCP1303_11
• Escalas, J. E., & Bettman, J. R. (2005). Self-construal, reference groups, and brand meaning. Journal of Consumer Research, 32(3), 378–389. https://doi.org/10.1086/425114
• 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
• Richins, M. L., & Dawson, S. (1992). A consumer values orientation for materialism and its measurement: Scale development and validation. Journal of Consumer Research, 19(3), 303–316. https://doi.org/10.1086/209304
• Sprott, D., Czellar, S., & Spangenberg, E. (2009). The importance of a general measure of brand engagement on market behavior: Development and validation of a scale. Journal of Marketing Research, 46(1), 92–104. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkr.46.1.92
• Swann, W. B., Jr. (1983). Self-verification: Bringing social reality into harmony with the self. In J. Suls & A. G. Greenwald (Eds.), Psychological perspectives on the self (Vol. 2, pp. 33–66). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
• Tajfel, H., & Turner, J. C. (1979). An integrative theory of intergroup conflict. In W. G. Austin & S. Worchel (Eds.), The social psychology of intergroup relations (pp. 33–47). Brooks/Cole.
• Tian, K. T., Bearden, W. O., & Hunter, G. L. (2001). Consumers’ need for uniqueness: Scale development and validation. Journal of Consumer Research, 28(1), 50–66. https://doi.org/10.1086/319618

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)