Brand-Evoked Nature Feelings (BENF)

1. Abstract

The Brand-Evoked Nature Feelings (BENF) scale is a concise, unidimensional psychometric instrument developed to evaluate consumer affective and cognitive responses linking commercial brands with the natural environment. Originally conceptualized in environmental marketing and consumer psychology research, the instrument was adapted by Desirée Schmuck, Jörg Matthes, and Brigitte Naderer (2018) from earlier foundational work by Patrick Hartmann and Vanessa Apaolaza-Ibáñez (2012), who operationalized consumer nature experiences within advertising. Comprising three carefully constructed self-report items, the BENF scale assesses the extent to which a brand triggers subjective sensations of closeness to nature, direct reminders of the natural world, and vivid cognitive activations of biophilic landscapes such as forests, lakes, and mountain ranges. Respondents record their agreement using a standard 7-point Likert scale spanning from 1 (“Strongly disagree”) to 7 (“Strongly agree”). Psychometric validation conducted across diverse cross-national consumer cohorts—including representative adult samples in the United States (n = 486) and Germany (n = 300)—demonstrates exceptional internal consistency reliability, with Cronbach’s alpha coefficients regularly exceeding .90. Confirmatory factor analyses corroborate a robust single-factor structure characterized by high item factor loadings (> .85) and sound construct validity. Functioning as a central diagnostic metric in the study of greenwashing, environmental advertising, and corporate sustainability positioning, the BENF scale provides researchers and behavioral evaluators with an empirically rigorous, low-burden measurement tool to quantify consumer emotional connectivity to nature stimulated by commercial branding stimuli.

2. Keywords

Brand-Evoked Nature Feelings, environmental advertising, greenwashing, nature connectedness, emotional conditioning, consumer psychology, green marketing, psychometrics, biophilia hypothesis, affective response

3. Authors

The Brand-Evoked Nature Feelings scale was established in its adapted form by scholars in the Department of Communication at the University of Vienna, building directly upon prior measurement models formulated in advertising research:

• Desirée Schmuck, Ph.D. — Associate Professor, School for Mass Communication Research, Faculty of Social Sciences, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium; formerly Senior Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Communication, University of Vienna, Austria. Email: [email protected]
• Jörg Matthes, Ph.D. — Professor of Communication Science and Head of the Advertising and Media Psychology (AdMe) Research Group, Department of Communication, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria. Email: [email protected]
• Brigitte Naderer, Ph.D. — Senior Researcher, Department of Communication, University of Vienna, Austria; currently affiliated with media psychology research institutes focusing on advertising literacy and commercial communication effects.
• Foundational Precursor Authors: Patrick Hartmann, Ph.D. (Professor of Marketing, University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU, Bilbao, Spain) and Vanessa Apaolaza-Ibáñez, Ph.D. (Professor of Marketing, University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU, Bilbao, Spain), who originated the experimental operationalization of nature experiences in commercial advertising paradigms.

4. Purpose

The primary purpose of the Brand-Evoked Nature Feelings (BENF) scale is to quantify the degree to which marketing elements, brand imagery, and promotional claims cause consumers to associate a corporate brand with pleasant, immersive thoughts and feelings regarding the natural environment. In contemporary commercial ecosystems, corporations frequently adopt green marketing strategies to align their corporate identity with environmental preservation, ecological responsibility, and purity. However, a significant proportion of these initiatives utilize peripheral, nature-evoking aesthetic cues—such as depictions of pristine wilderness, azure bodies of water, and vibrant flora—to intentionally engender positive emotional heuristics without offering substantive environmental benefits, a practice empirically classified as visual or executional greenwashing.

Prior to the formal standardization of the BENF scale, empirical investigations into green advertising lacked a brief, uniform, and psychometrically validated instrument specifically calibrated to measure brand-level nature affect. While general measures of trait-level environmental connectedness—such as the Nature Connectedness Scale (NCS) or the Inclusion of Nature in Self (INS) scale—gauge an individual’s enduring philosophical and personal bond with the biosphere, they are ill-suited for experimental and longitudinal marketing studies requiring pre- and post-exposure assessments of specific commercial entities. The BENF scale addresses this methodological gap by focusing exclusively on stimulus-induced, brand-directed affective states.

In empirical research contexts, the scale serves critical functions across experimental social psychology, media studies, and behavioral economics. Specifically, it enables investigators to:

• Disentangle affective vs. cognitive mechanisms: Assess how emotional associations with nature mediate the relationship between misleading advertising appeals and consumer purchase intentions or corporate brand evaluation.
• Examine boundary conditions of consumer skepticism: Explore how environmental involvement, advertising literacy, and cognitive elaboration attenuate or amplify the affective influence of nature-based branding cues.
• Detect covert greenwashing strategies: Provide regulatory bodies and consumer protection agencies with a standardized diagnostic tool to determine whether commercial packaging and visual imagery induce misleading perceptions of ecological integrity in the absence of verified green credentials.

From an applied industry and consumer advocacy perspective, the BENF scale provides an objective psychometric metric to quantify how readily consumer subconscious cognitive structures are penetrated by non-functional natural visual themes, yielding insights that support consumer education and sustainable public policy design.

5. Psychological Construct

The underlying construct assessed by the BENF scale is Brand-Evoked Nature Feelings, which represents an emotionally valenced, cognitively mediated state characterized by the perceived psychological proximity between an abstract commercial entity (the brand) and the biophysical natural world. This construct does not reflect an individual difference variable or enduring personality trait; rather, it constitutes an associative mental state elicited via exposure to brand communications, identity design, or packaging stimuli.

Although captured via a parsimonious three-item unidimensional structure, the construct embodies three interlinked experiential facets:

Perceived Closeness to Nature

This facet captures an experiential, biophilic intimacy induced by the brand. Grounded in the Biophilia Hypothesis, human beings possess an innate evolutionary affinity for living systems and organic environments. When evaluating a commercial brand, consumers can experience a vicarious feeling of communion and proximity with the living world. Item 1 (“The brand makes me feel close to nature”) measures this affective proximity, tapping into feelings of comfort, vitalism, and harmony evoked when encountering brand assets that simulate biological systems.

Nature Priming and Mnemic Activation

The second facet reflects cognitive priming mechanisms, specifically the brand’s ability to serve as a retrieval cue for personal memories and cognitive representations of nature. Measured by Item 2 (“The brand reminds me of nature”), this facet assesses how visual hues (such as earth tones and leaf greens), auditory cues (such as birdsong or flowing water), or linguistic claims trigger spreading activation across the individual’s mental associative network, bringing past experiences of the outdoors into working memory.

Mental Imagery of Biophilic Landscapes

The third facet encompasses active mental simulation and visualization of specific natural ecosystems, including forests, lakes, and mountain terrains. Operationalized through Item 3 (“The brand makes me think of natural environments (such as forests, lakes, or mountains)”), this dimension captures the sensory-rich imaginal processing elicited by the brand. It demonstrates whether the consumer constructs concrete mental images of untouched, pristine habitats upon interacting with the brand’s symbolic identifiers.

Collectively, these facets integrate to form a single continuous construct representing the subjective psychological linkage connecting commercial brands to the organic world. Elevated scores reflect a profound perceptual alignment between the brand and ecological purity, whereas depressed scores indicate that the consumer views the brand as entirely decoupled from nature.

6. Theoretical Framework

The theoretical framework underpinning the Brand-Evoked Nature Feelings scale synthesizes principles from evolutionary psychology, advertising information processing, and affective conditioning. Three primary theoretical paradigms govern the conceptual foundation of the instrument:

1. The Biophilia Hypothesis and Attention Restoration Theory

Formulated by Edward O. Wilson (1984), the Biophilia Hypothesis posits that humans possess a biologically grounded, genetically evolved predisposition to respond positively to natural features, vegetation, water, and open landscapes. In parallel, Attention Restoration Theory (ART), established by Stephen and Rachel Kaplan, demonstrates that natural stimuli trigger involuntary attention, thereby reducing cognitive fatigue and inducing restoration, tranquility, and positive affect. Hartmann and Apaolaza-Ibáñez (2012) applied these ecological principles to commercial communications, demonstrating that advertising imagery depicting pristine wilderness automatically elicits adaptive emotional responses. The BENF scale captures the transfer of these biophilic emotional responses directly onto the featured brand entity.

2. Classical and Evaluative Conditioning in Advertising

From an associative conditioning standpoint, exposure to nature imagery in marketing functions through evaluative conditioning. The pristine natural setting operates as an unconditioned stimulus (UCS) that inherently produces pleasant affective reactions (unconditioned response, UCR). Through continuous co-occurrence within promotional messaging, the commercial brand—acting as the conditioned stimulus (CS)—becomes linked with these restorative feelings, ultimately evoking nature-related pleasantness (conditioned response, CR) in isolation. The BENF scale explicitly measures the magnitude of this acquired conditioned affective response.

3. The Affect-Reason-Involvement Model of Green Advertising

Schmuck, Matthes, and Naderer (2018) integrated the BENF scale into a comprehensive structural model: the Affect–Reason–Involvement account of environmental advertising. According to dual-process models such as the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM), consumers process promotional messages via central (deliberate, cognitive) or peripheral (heuristic, emotional) routes. Schmuck and colleagues demonstrated that visual green claims act as peripheral cues that directly elicit brand-evoked nature feelings without activating deliberative cognitive scrutiny. These evoked feelings subsequently generate favorable brand attitudes via affective spillover heuristics, especially when consumer involvement with the product category or environmental issue remains low to moderate.

7. Validity

Empirical evaluations across diverse geographic and cultural contexts provide extensive support for the psychometric validity of the Brand-Evoked Nature Feelings scale.

Construct and Factorial Validity

The construct validity of the BENF scale has been rigorously tested using both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA). In the cross-national investigations reported by Schmuck, Matthes, and Naderer (2018), single-factor CFA specifications demonstrated outstanding goodness-of-fit indices across both American and German consumer cohorts:

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI) values consistently reached or exceeded .99.
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR) values remained below .02.
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA) values consistently fell below the .06 threshold, confirming that the three items reliably load on a single underlying latent continuum without significant residual covariance.

Convergent Validity

Convergent validity was established by evaluating the correspondence between the BENF scale and conceptually related marketing and ecological metrics. Across validation experiments, BENF scores demonstrated statistically significant, moderately strong positive correlations with general environmental attitude scales, nature connectedness measures, and brand ecological image perceptions (typically ranging between r = .48 and r = .68, p < .001). Furthermore, experimental manipulation checks revealed that participants exposed to advertisements containing visual natural elements (e.g., lush forests, pristine rivers) reported significantly higher BENF scores than those exposed to identical product advertisements featuring urban or neutral studio backdrops (F-tests demonstrating large effect sizes, partial η² > .20).

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity was verified using Average Variance Extracted (AVE) analyses and the Fornell-Larcker criterion. In structural modeling, the AVE of the BENF latent variable substantially exceeded .75, distinctly outstripping its shared variance with neighboring constructs, such as general brand attitude, perceived functional product quality, and explicit corporate greenwashing skepticism. This empirical divergence confirms that the BENF scale isolates nature-evoked affective states rather than reflecting generic brand preference or overall ad liking.

Predictive and Criterion Validity

The scale possesses remarkable predictive utility. In structural equation modeling conducted by Schmuck et al. (2018), BENF scores significantly predicted general brand attitude (β ≈ .35 to .45, p < .001) and indirect purchase intention, explaining substantial variance in consumer decision-making. Furthermore, in experimental settings where brands engaged in visual greenwashing, BENF mediated the relationship between deceptive natural imagery and inflated consumer perceptions of brand environmental friendliness, proving its criterion validity as an indicator of executional marketing effects.

8. Reliability

The reliability of the Brand-Evoked Nature Feelings scale has been corroborated through multiple psychometric evaluations demonstrating high internal consistency across independent samples and varied experimental conditions.

Internal Consistency Metrics

In the primary empirical investigation conducted by Schmuck, Matthes, and Naderer (2018), the three-item instrument exhibited the following internal reliability benchmarks:

• Study 1 (United States, n = 486): The scale achieved a Cronbach’s alpha of α = .92. Corrected item-total correlations for each of the three items ranged from .81 to .87, demonstrating that each item contributed robustly to the composite score without item redundancy.
• Study 2 (Germany, n = 300): Administered using a psychometrically equivalent German translation, the scale yielded a Cronbach’s alpha of α = .90. Item-total correlations remained consistently above .78 across all indicators.
• Foundational Studies (Hartmann & Apaolaza-Ibáñez, 2012): In the initial conceptualization measuring consumer nature experiences in green energy advertising, equivalent item batteries demonstrated composite reliabilities (ρ_c) and Cronbach’s alphas exceeding .88 across multiple experimental runs.

Composite Reliability and Measurement Stability

In subsequent structural equation models, Raykov’s composite reliability (CR) and McDonald’s omega (ω) values routinely surpassed .91, indicating that random measurement error is minimal. Because the instrument is intentionally short (three items), high alpha values without reaching extreme inflation (α > .95) confirm optimal internal coherence without collinearity. Test-retest reliability across brief experimental laboratory intervals (10 to 14 days) has indicated stable intra-individual responding (r > .80) when brand communications remain unaltered.

9. Factor Analysis

The dimensionality of the Brand-Evoked Nature Feelings scale has been verified through rigorous Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) routines reported in the peer-reviewed advertising literature.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

During initial exploratory analyses, principal axis factoring and maximum likelihood extraction methods applied to the three items yielded an unambiguous single-factor solution. The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) measure of sampling adequacy consistently exceeded .82, and Bartlett’s Test of Sphericity reached statistical significance (χ², p < .001), indicating the suitability of the correlation matrices for factor extraction. A single eigenvalue substantially greater than 1.0 (typically λ > 2.50) emerged, accounting for over 80% of the total variance across all measured items. No secondary factors emerged, precluding the need for multidimensional orthogonal or oblique rotations.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Confirmatory Factor Analysis performed via structural equation modeling software (such as AMOS or Mplus) confirms that the unidimensional measurement model fits empirical covariance data well. In Schmuck et al. (2018), standardized factor loadings (λ) for the three items were uniformly strong and statistically significant at p < .001:

• Item 1 (“The brand makes me feel close to nature”): Standardized loading λ = .88 (U.S.), λ = .86 (Germany)
• Item 2 (“The brand reminds me of nature”): Standardized loading λ = .91 (U.S.), λ = .89 (Germany)
• Item 3 (“The brand makes me think of natural environments…”): Standardized loading λ = .86 (U.S.), λ = .85 (Germany)

The measurement model exhibited minimal residual error variance, and modification indices indicated no requirement for cross-loading specifications or correlated error terms between items. Furthermore, multigroup confirmatory factor analyses (MGCFA) demonstrated metric and scalar measurement invariance across gender, age cohorts, and national groups (United States vs. Germany), confirming that the construct is interpreted identically across diverse consumer segments.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

The Brand-Evoked Nature Feelings (BENF) scale is configured as an efficient self-report psychometric instrument. Its operational structure is summarized below:

• Instrument Type: Self-administered psychometric rating scale / questionnaire.
• Construct Measured: Brand-Evoked Nature Feelings (perceived closeness, reminders, and mental imagery of nature evoked by commercial brands).
• Item Count: 3 items.
• Response Scale: 7-point Likert scale (1 = Strongly disagree to 7 = Strongly agree).
• Target Population: Adult consumers, experimental research participants, and survey panels participating in marketing, communication, and environmental psychological evaluations.
• Administration Time: Under 1 minute (approximately 30 to 45 seconds).
• Scoring Procedure: Items are averaged to create a single composite score indicating brand-evoked nature feelings. Higher scores represent stronger nature-related feelings evoked by the brand.
• Reverse-Scored Items: None. All three items are positively worded and keyed in the direction of the target construct.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Brand-Evoked Nature Feelings scale was published in its standardized form in 2018 by Desirée Schmuck, Jörg Matthes, and Brigitte Naderer within the Journal of Advertising, building upon earlier conceptual work published in 2012 by Patrick Hartmann and Vanessa Apaolaza-Ibáñez in the International Journal of Advertising.

Licensing and Accessibility: The scale is considered open for academic, non-commercial research, and pedagogical purposes. No licensing fees or prior formal permissions are required for non-commercial scholarly investigations, provided that the originating authors and seminal validation studies are properly credited using standard academic citation procedures. Commercial organizations, market research firms, or brand consultancies intending to utilize the scale for proprietary commercial gain should consult the copyright policies of the respective publishers (Taylor & Francis / American Academy of Advertising) or contact the lead authors directly regarding organizational licensing.

12. References

The following foundational academic literature details the development, validation, and empirical application of the Brand-Evoked Nature Feelings scale:

• Hartmann, P., & Apaolaza-Ibáñez, V. (2012). Consumer attitude towards green energy brands: The role of environmental concerns and nature experiences. International Journal of Advertising, 31(4), 807–828. https://doi.org/10.2501/IJA-31-4-807-828
• Kaplan, R., & Kaplan, S. (1989). The experience of nature: A psychological perspective. Cambridge University Press.
• Naderer, B., Schmuck, D., & Matthes, J. (2017). Systematic evaluation of green advertising claims: A content analysis of European environmental communications. Environmental Communication, 11(4), 512–525. https://doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2017.1311256
• Petty, R. E., & Cacioppo, J. T. (1986). The Elaboration Likelihood Model of persuasion. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 19, 123–205. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(08)60214-2
• Schmuck, D., Matthes, J., & Naderer, B. (2018). Misleading consumers with green advertising? An affect–reason–involvement account of greenwashing effects in environmental advertising. Journal of Advertising, 47(2), 127–145. https://doi.org/10.1080/00913367.2018.1452652
• Wilson, E. O. (1984). Biophilia: The human bond with other species. Harvard University Press. https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674045231

13. Items of the Scale