Brand Experience (Sensory) (BE)

Abstract

The Brand Experience (Sensory) (BE) scale represents a foundational psychometric subscale developed by J. Joško Brakus, Bernd H. Schmitt, and Lia Zarantonello (2009) to evaluate the sensory dimension of consumer-brand interactions. Conceptualized as an integral facet of the overarching multidimensional brand experience construct, the sensory scale measures the degree to which brand-related stimuli evoke sensations across visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile, and gustatory modalities. Comprising three operationalized items evaluated on a 7-point Likert-type continuum, the instrument captures whether a brand makes a profound impression on sensory perception, cultivates aesthetic interest, or fails to engage the senses (via a reverse-coded metric). Psychometric investigations across diverse retail, technological, service, and consumer packaged goods settings demonstrate that the sensory subscale exhibits robust internal consistency reliability (with Cronbach’s alpha coefficients typically ranging from α = .77 to α = .88 and composite reliability exceeding .80). Confirmatory factor analyses confirm its distinct dimensionality, loading cleanly onto a dedicated first-order sensory factor within second-order experiential hierarchies. The scale possesses pronounced convergent validity, showing strong associations with brand aesthetics and sensory appeal, as well as discriminant validity against adjacent consumer behavior constructs such as brand attitude, brand involvement, and brand personality traits. Furthermore, the instrument displays rigorous predictive and nomological validity, demonstrating significant direct and indirect effects on consumer satisfaction, affective commitment, brand love, and repeat behavioral loyalty. This article provides an extensive academic exposition of the scale’s theoretical foundations, psychometric architecture, validity evidence, and empirical implementation protocols.

Keywords

brand experience, sensory marketing, sensory perception, psychometrics, Brakus scale, consumer psychology, brand loyalty, experiential marketing, sensory branding, embodied cognition, aesthetic impression, scale validation

Authors

The Brand Experience construct and its validated sensory subscale were conceptualized, developed, and empirically validated by a team of prominent consumer behavior and marketing scholars:

• J. Joško Brakus, Ph.D. — Professor of Marketing, Leeds University Business School, University of Leeds, United Kingdom. His research focuses on consumer experiential processing, brand relationships, and decision making.
• Bernd H. Schmitt, Ph.D. — Robert D. Calkins Professor of International Business and Faculty Director of the Center on Global Brand Leadership at Columbia Business School, Columbia University, New York, USA. Widely recognized as a pioneer of experiential marketing and customer experience management.
• Lia Zarantonello, Ph.D. — Professor of Marketing at Roehampton University Business School, London, United Kingdom (formerly at Bocconi University, Milan, Italy). Her research specializes in consumer-brand relationships, consumer psychology, and brand communication.

The original seminal paper documenting the systematic development and psychometric validation of the instrument was published in the Journal of Marketing under the title “Brand Experience: What Is It? How Is It Measured? Does It Affect Loyalty?” (Brakus, Schmitt, & Zarantonello, 2009).

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Brand Experience (Sensory) subscale is to quantitatively evaluate the depth, saliency, and aesthetic resonance of sensory impressions generated by brand-related stimuli during consumer interactions. Prior to the psychometric validation work conducted by Brakus et al. (2009), academic research in marketing and applied psychology predominantly conceptualized consumer-brand interactions through cognitive and evaluative frameworks, such as brand equity, brand associations, utilitarian perceived quality, and brand attitude. Alternatively, affective inquiries focused exclusively on generalized brand emotions or motivational attachments. These traditional paradigms frequently treated sensory stimulation either as passive background noise or as an undifferentiated precursor to cognitive evaluations.

The sensory subscale was constructed to fill this theoretical and empirical void. It specifically measures subjective, internal consumer responses provoked by deliberate brand design elements, packaging, store environments, interface architectures, physical textures, product sounds, and distinct olfactory signatures. Rather than assessing overall brand liking or functional performance, the purpose of this tool is to isolate the perceptual “felt” impression that a brand leaves upon human sensory systems. In empirical research settings, the tool enables researchers to investigate how sensory inputs trigger bottom-up cognitive mechanisms, form long-lasting episodic brand memories, and drive holistic experiential brand perceptions.

From an applied and managerial perspective, the subscale serves as a diagnostic instrument across several domains:

• Sensory Audit and Benchmarking: Enterprises utilize the scale to conduct diagnostic evaluations of physical retail atmospheres, website interfaces, product tactile ergonomics, and packaging redesigns, benchmarking sensory appeal against industry competitors.
• Product Design and Prototyping: Psychologists and design engineers deploy the metric in pre-market consumer laboratory testing to assess whether novel sensory cues (e.g., the acoustic snap of a container, the haptic weight of a device, the chromatic balance of a visual identity) successfully register with target audiences.
• Predictive Analytics for Customer Lifetime Value: Because sensory experiences represent the most immediate, visceral point of brand contact, measuring sensory experiential scores allows firms to statistically model downstream behavioral outcomes, including customer satisfaction, brand trust, brand advocacy, and long-term brand loyalty.

Psychological Construct

The psychological construct evaluated by this instrument is Sensory Brand Experience, defined as the subjective, internal consumer responses (sensations) evoked by brand-related stimuli that appeal to the human perceptual modalities, including vision, audition, olfaction, haptics, and gustation. In the conceptual framework of Brakus, Schmitt, and Zarantonello (2009), brand experience is conceptualized as a multi-dimensional psychological phenomenon comprised of four distinct dimensions: sensory, affective, intellectual, and behavioral. The sensory dimension forms the perceptual bedrock upon which experiential engagements are initiated.

Sensory brand experience differs substantially from traditional evaluative constructs in psychological and consumer literature:

• Distinction from Brand Attitude: While a brand attitude represents an enduring, overall evaluative judgment (e.g., “I believe this brand is good/bad”), sensory brand experience represents an immediate or remembered phenomenal impression (e.g., “This brand stimulates my visual and physical senses”). An individual can perceive a brand as possessing strong, memorable sensory properties while simultaneously holding a neutral or even negative attitude toward it.
• Distinction from Brand Personality: Brand personality involves the projection of human personality traits onto a commercial brand entity (such as sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication, or ruggedness). In contrast, sensory brand experience assesses visceral sensations elicited by tangible and intangible brand contact points, devoid of anthropomorphic trait attributions.
• Distinction from Brand Involvement: Brand involvement indicates a motivational state of perceived personal relevance and importance based on inherent needs, values, and interests. Sensory brand experience does not require high involvement; even incidental, low-involvement exposures to sensory cues (e.g., walking past a store with a signature ambient scent) can induce intense sensory impressions.

The sensory subscale assesses both positive aesthetic engagement (“interesting in a sensory way”) and general multi-sensory salience (“makes a strong impression on my visual sense or other senses”), balanced against an inverse check for sensory indifference or failure to stimulate perceptual channels (“does not appeal to my senses”). Through this tripartite formulation, the construct captures the intensity and hedonic quality of the sensory interface between consumer and brand.

Theoretical Framework

The theoretical architecture supporting the Brand Experience (Sensory) scale is grounded in multidisciplinary traditions spanning cognitive psychology, embodied cognition, sensory marketing theory, and experiential philosophy.

1. Experiential Marketing Theory

The structural framework originates directly from the foundational work of Bernd Schmitt (1999) on Strategic Experiential Modules (SEMs). Schmitt challenged the prevailing information-processing paradigm in consumer psychology, which viewed customers primarily as rational decision-makers calculating utilitarian benefits and costs. Schmitt posited that modern consumers seek experiences characterized by sensory gratification (SENSE), emotional resonance (FEEL), creative cognitive stimulation (THINK), physical behaviors and lifestyles (ACT), and social identity integration (RELATE). The SENSE module specifically focuses on aesthetic pleasure, sensory stimulation, and stylistic differentiation. Brakus et al. (2009) translated this broad conceptual module into a psychometrically rigorous, operationalized subscale designed to withstand standard structural equation modeling criteria.

2. Embodied Cognition and Perceptual Grounding

The scale is anchored theoretically in theories of grounded and embodied cognition (Barsalou, 1999, 2008; Lakoff & Johnson, 1999). Embodied cognition asserts that mental concepts, semantic brand knowledge, and higher-order affective judgments are grounded in sensorimotor neural systems. When consumers encounter a brand, their cognitive representations are not composed of abstract, amodal symbols; rather, they rely on perceptual re-enactments (simulations) of prior sensory encounters. A consumer who experiences visual elegance, tactile smoothness, or distinct acoustics retains sensory traces that fundamentally anchor their conceptual memory of that brand. The sensory subscale captures the subjective residue of these embodied interactions.

3. Sensory Marketing and Multisensory Integration

The psychological foundations of the scale interface directly with sensory marketing theory (Krishna, 2012; Hultén, 2011). Sensory marketing emphasizes that non-conscious, sensory triggers exert profound influences on consumer perception, categorization, and judgment. Through cross-modal sensory correspondences (Spence, 2011), visual characteristics (e.g., color saturation, geometric symmetry), tactile properties (e.g., weight, surface friction), auditory cues (e.g., brand jingles, product opening sounds), and ambient olfactory signatures interact synergistically. The sensory scale reflects the outcome of this multisensory integration, evaluating whether the unified sensory architecture of the brand successfully achieves perceptual prominence.

Validity

The psychometric validity of the Brand Experience (Sensory) subscale has been extensively verified across multiple international contexts, consumption domains, and methodological paradigms. Brakus, Schmitt, and Zarantonello (2009) established validity across six comprehensive studies involving diverse product categories (including personal computers, athletic footwear, retail apparel, consumer electronics, and automotive brands).

Construct and Convergent Validity

Convergent validity evaluates whether the sensory items correlate strongly with theoretical constructs with which they should conceptually align. Brakus et al. (2009) demonstrated that the sensory items exhibit high standardized factor loadings (λ ≥ .71 to λ ≥ .86) on their specified latent construct in confirmatory factor analysis models. Furthermore, the Average Variance Extracted (AVE) for the sensory dimension consistently exceeds the established .50 psychometric benchmark (Fornell & Larcker, 1981), demonstrating that the scale captures substantially more construct-relevant variance than measurement error. Subsequent empirical replications have shown strong positive correlations between the sensory subscale and measures of brand aesthetic design, store atmospheric pleasantness, and physical sensory attractiveness.

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity confirms that the sensory subscale captures a construct distinct from other brand-related psychological metrics. Using the Fornell-Larcker criterion, Brakus et al. demonstrated that the square root of the AVE for the sensory dimension exceeds its highest inter-construct correlations with the affective, intellectual, and behavioral dimensions of the scale. More recent validation studies using the rigorous Heterotrait-Monotrait (HTMT) ratio of correlations report values well below the conservative .85 threshold, establishing distinctiveness from:

• Brand Attitude: The sensory experience subscale correlates moderately with generalized attitude (typical r values between .35 and .52), yet confirmatory model comparisons reveal that models specifying separate sensory and attitude factors exhibit statistically superior fit (Δχ² tests, p < .001) relative to single-factor collapsed models.
• Brand Personality Dimensions: Sensory experience demonstrates discriminant validity against Aaker’s (1997) five brand personality dimensions, showing distinct operational pathways and minimal cross-loadings.
• Affective and Intellectual Dimensions: While sensory inputs can trigger emotional (affective) and cognitive (intellectual) responses, CFA models confirm that sensory experience operates as an empirically distinguishable primary construct.

Predictive and Nomological Validity

The sensory subscale exhibits robust nomological validity within structural equation models examining downstream consumer behaviors. In the original validation studies, sensory brand experience demonstrated significant positive direct effects on customer satisfaction and brand loyalty (β ≥ .24, p < .01). Furthermore, research utilizing the scale has revealed that sensory brand experience serves as a critical antecedent to brand love, consumer-brand identification, willing price premiums, and positive electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM). In longitudinal research designs, sensory experience scores measured at baseline have demonstrated significant predictive power regarding actual repeat purchases measured six months later.

Reliability

Reliability analyses across numerous independent empirical investigations consistently demonstrate that the Brand Experience (Sensory) subscale meets or exceeds rigorous psychometric standards for internal consistency and measurement precision.

Internal Consistency Reliability

In the foundational scale development studies conducted by Brakus et al. (2009), the internal consistency of the three-item sensory dimension was evaluated across multiple consumer samples:

• In the initial scale construction sample (Study 2, N = 196), the sensory dimension yielded a Cronbach’s alpha of α = .77.
• In the subsequent confirmatory cross-validation sample spanning a heterogeneous selection of consumer brands (Study 3, N = 217), the Cronbach’s alpha coefficient reached α = .83.
• Across diverse independent replication studies in retail settings, mobile technology, luxury consumption, and hospitality, reported Cronbach’s alpha values for the sensory subscale routinely range between α = .81 and α = .89.

Furthermore, structural equation modeling assessments demonstrate that the Composite Reliability (CR) of the sensory subscale typically ranges between .82 and .90, substantially exceeding the recommended psychometric cutoff of .70 (Hair et al., 2019). The item-total correlations for each of the three sensory items consistently exceed .60, confirming high internal coherence across items.

Test-Retest Reliability and Temporal Stability

To establish that the sensory subscale measures a persistent perceptual orientation toward a brand rather than a transient, momentary mood fluctuation, longitudinal stability assessments have been conducted. In test-retest investigations with inter-trial intervals of two to four weeks, the intra-class correlation coefficients (ICC) and Pearson correlation coefficients for the sensory subscale exceeded r = .78 (p < .001). This demonstrates high temporal stability, confirming that while sensory brand experience is sensitive to brand stimulus modifications, it captures an enduring experiential profile in consumers’ memory representations.

Factor Analysis

The structural validity and dimensional purity of the sensory items were established using rigorous Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) procedures.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

During the initial item generation and reduction phase, Brakus, Schmitt, and Zarantonello (2009) compiled an extensive item pool reflecting diverse experiential responses. Using principal axis factoring and maximum likelihood extraction with oblique (promax/oblimin) rotations to allow for expected correlations among experiential dimensions, the exploratory analyses systematically revealed a clean four-factor solution representing Sensory, Affective, Intellectual, and Behavioral experiences.

The three items designated to measure sensory experience exhibited strong, unequivocal factor loadings on the sensory factor (all > .65), while maintaining negligible cross-loadings (< .20) on the affective, intellectual, and behavioral factors. The sensory factor accounted for substantial unique variance, confirming its distinct structural identity.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

In confirmatory factor analysis models, the three sensory items were specified as observable continuous indicators of a single latent first-order Sensory Brand Experience factor. Typical CFA results demonstrate outstanding parameter estimates and factor loadings:

• Item 1 (“visual sense or other senses”): Standardized factor loading λ ≈ .82 to .88 (p < .001).
• Item 2 (“interesting in a sensory way”): Standardized factor loading λ ≈ .80 to .86 (p < .001).
• Item 3 (“does not appeal to my senses” – reverse scored): Standardized factor loading λ ≈ .68 to .76 (p < .001).

Model Fit Indices

Across validation studies evaluating the full brand experience model and the isolated sensory measurement model, confirmatory factor analyses indicate exemplary model fit across standard goodness-of-fit indices:

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): Consistently reported between .95 and .99 (benchmark > .95).
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): Typically ranges between .94 and .98 (benchmark > .95).
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): Values routinely fall between .035 and .058, with 90% confidence intervals well below the .08 acceptable threshold.
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): Values uniformly fall below .045 (benchmark < .08).

Measurement invariance analyses across demographic groups (e.g., gender, age cohorts) and brand categories (e.g., hedonic vs. utilitarian product classifications) have confirmed metric and scalar invariance, establishing that the sensory subscale items operate equivalently across diverse observational populations.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The structural specifications, administration requirements, and scoring algorithms for the Brand Experience (Sensory) scale are detailed below:

• Instrument Name: Brand Experience (Sensory) Subscale (BE-Sensory)
• Original Authors: J. Joško Brakus, Bernd H. Schmitt, and Lia Zarantonello (2009)
• Primary Application Domain: Consumer Psychology, Marketing Management, Sensory Branding, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Retail Experience Design
• Administration Format: Self-administered paper-and-pencil or computerized self-report questionnaire
• Target Population: Adult consumers (ages 18+) possessing cognitive awareness of or experiential interaction with the focal brand; adaptable for adolescent consumer research
• Total Number of Items: 3 items
• Response Continuum: 7-point Likert scale (ranging from 1 = “Strongly disagree” to 7 = “Strongly agree” or 1 = “Not at all descriptive” to 7 = “Extremely descriptive”)
• Estimated Completion Duration: Approximately 1 to 2 minutes
• Scoring Methodology:
  • Reverse Scoring: Item 3 is negatively keyed and MUST be reverse-scored prior to composite index calculation: Item 3_Reversed = 8 - Item 3_Raw.
  • Mean Dimensional Score: Sum the scores of Item 1, Item 2, and Item 3_Reversed, then divide by 3. Scores range from 1.00 to 7.00.
  • Sum Score: Alternatively, calculate the raw arithmetic sum (ranging from 3 to 21). Higher numerical values reflect a more profound, favorable, and evocative sensory brand experience.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Brand Experience (Sensory) subscale was formally published in May 2009 in the Journal of Marketing, a peer-reviewed academic journal published by the American Marketing Association (AMA). In accordance with customary academic publishing conventions, the operational scale items, theoretical frameworks, and psychometric documentation are available in the public scientific domain for scholarly, academic, and non-commercial research purposes without direct license fees.

Scholars and university researchers may administer the scale without formal written permission, provided appropriate scholarly attribution is accorded through standard bibliographic citation of the original validation paper (Brakus et al., 2009). For commercial deployments, large-scale proprietary corporate diagnostics, or incorporation within commercial customer experience software platforms, users should consult the permissions desk of the American Marketing Association and respect intellectual property rights associated with copyrighted journal publications.

References

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• Hultén, B. (2011). Sensory marketing: The multi-sensory brand-experience concept. European Business Review, 23(3), 256–273. https://doi.org/10.1108/09555341111130245
• Krishna, A. (2012). An integrative review of sensory marketing: Engaging the senses to affect perception, judgment and behavior. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 22(3), 332–351. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcps.2011.08.003
• Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy in the flesh: The embodied mind and its challenge to Western thought. Basic Books.
• Schmitt, B. H. (1999). Experiential marketing. Journal of Marketing Management, 15(1-3), 53–67. https://doi.org/10.1362/026725799784870496
• Spence, C. (2011). Crossmodal correspondences: A tutorial review. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 73(4), 971–995. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-010-0073-7

Items of the Scale