Brand Relationship Orientation (BRO)

1. Abstract

The Brand Relationship Orientation (BRO) scale is a specialized psychometric instrument designed to quantify consumers' subjective perceptions regarding the extent to which a commercial brand actively seeks to cultivate interpersonal closeness, social connection, and relational intimacy, as opposed to merely executing commercial transactions. Developed by Marina Puzakova and Hyokjin Kwak in their foundational 2017 investigation published in the Journal of Marketing, the instrument was adapted from the seminal relational communication frameworks established by Judee K. Burgoon and Jerold L. Hale (1984, 1987). Grounded within consumer-brand relationship theory and the literature on brand anthropomorphism, the instrument operationalizes consumer perceptions of an organization's relational intent across three tightly coupled items. Administered on a 7-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (“Strongly Disagree”) to 7 (“Strongly Agree”), the BRO scale provides an efficient, unidimensional metric derived from the arithmetic mean of its items, where higher composite scores represent an elevated perceived orientation toward bilateral social connection. Psychometric evaluations across pretesting and experimental studies demonstrate robust internal consistency, strong unidimensional factor structures with high standardized loadings, and substantial predictive and convergent validity in experimental designs examining social crowding, boundary regulation, and retail consumer behavior. The measure serves as an indispensable tool for researchers and practitioners evaluating relational marketing communications, social media personification strategies, and humanlike artificial intelligence agent interactions.

2. Keywords

Brand Relationship Orientation, brand anthropomorphism, relational communication, consumer-brand relationships, consumer psychology, intimacy initiation, brand closeness, social crowding, psychometrics, relational marketing

3. Authors

The Brand Relationship Orientation (BRO) scale was adapted and validated in marketing literature by:

• Marina Puzakova, Ph.D. — Associate Professor of Marketing, College of Business, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA, USA. Her research focuses on brand anthropomorphism, consumer-brand relationships, brand crisis management, and global marketing communication.
• Hyokjin Kwak, Ph.D. — Professor of Marketing, LeBow College of Business, Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA, USA. His scholarship investigates consumer behavior, brand communications, interactive advertising, and international marketing dynamics.

The conceptual foundation originates from the interpersonal relational communication research conducted by:

• Judee K. Burgoon, Ph.D. — Professor Emerita of Communication, Family Studies, and Human Development, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA.
• Jerold L. Hale, Ph.D. — Professor of Communication and former Provost/Vice Chancellor, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, Chattanooga, TN, USA.

4. Purpose

In contemporary consumer psychology and strategic brand management, organizations increasingly depart from purely utilitarian, transactional positioning in favor of personified communication strategies designed to foster long-term emotional loyalty. The primary purpose of the Brand Relationship Orientation (BRO) scale is to measure a consumer's cognitive perception that a focal brand is actively attempting to establish social closeness, relational warmth, and psychological intimacy. Rather than assessing a consumer's own attachment or loyalty toward a brand (as evaluated in traditional brand love or brand attachment inventories), the BRO explicitly evaluates the inferred motivation and behavioral intent of the brand as perceived by the consumer.

From a theoretical perspective, understanding inferred brand intentions is critical because human social cognition treats intentional social actors fundamentally differently from inanimate tools. When consumers infer that an entity possesses agency and benevolent or relational intent, their downstream responses are governed by social norms rather than exchange norms. In commercial contexts, whether consumers perceive a brand as seeking a bilateral social bond can produce either profound strategic advantages (such as brand forgiveness, affective commitment, and co-creation behaviors) or distinct compensatory backlashes (such as reactance, boundary protection, and brand avoidance when consumers feel their personal space or autonomy is invaded).

The scale was originally engineered to function as an empirical verification tool in experimental research testing the interaction between brand anthropomorphism and retail environment characteristics, specifically social crowding. In retail environments characterized by high consumer density, individuals experience a heightened psychological need for personal space and relational withdrawal. Consequently, when an anthropomorphized brand signals high relationship orientation (e.g., “let's be friends,” “we want to be close to you”), consumers perceive this as an unwelcome social intrusion, prompting negative brand evaluations. The BRO scale precisely captures this relational signaling, allowing researchers to isolate whether marketing stimuli successfully convey relationship-building intentions across experimental conditions.

Beyond experimental manipulation checks, the BRO scale fulfills critical applied research objectives. In digital and omnichannel environments, consumer interfaces increasingly feature interactive chatbots, conversational artificial intelligence, and community-driven social media personas. Brand managers must calibrate whether these interfaces are perceived as appropriately communicative or excessively intrusive. The BRO scale provides a standardized, parsimonious diagnostic measure for evaluating whether copy strategies, direct marketing campaigns, and interactive algorithms successfully communicate relational intent without overstepping consumer comfort boundaries.

5. Psychological Construct

The psychological construct captured by the Brand Relationship Orientation (BRO) scale is a multidimensional social perception consolidated into a parsimonious, unidimensional cognitive index. The construct reflects perceived relational intent, which encapsulates three interrelated psychological facets:

5.1 Perceived Relationship Initiation

This facet assesses the consumer's appraisal that the brand is attempting to transcend transactional commerce to establish an enduring, reciprocal social tie. In human relational formation models, initial social encounters require one or both actors to initiate communication patterns that signal affiliation and long-term interest. In brand contexts, relational initiation is evidenced by brand narratives that emphasize mutual partnership, ongoing dialogue, and shared community rather than one-off product features or promotional discounts.

5.2 Perceived Intimacy Cultivation

Intimacy in social psychology is defined as the mutual validation, emotional warmth, and vulnerability experienced between interacting partners. When operationalized within consumer-brand interactions, perceived intimacy cultivation represents the consumer's belief that a brand's communications are personalized, psychologically attuned, and seeking a deeper level of private understanding. Brands convey intimacy through conversational tone, empathetic customer service interactions, personalized content curation, and disclosures of corporate values or “behind-the-scenes” narratives that mirror human self-disclosure.

5.3 Perceived Closeness Facilitation

Closeness pertains to perceived psychological proximity and the reduction of social distance. Derived from interpersonal communication theory, psychological closeness reflects the degree to which an individual perceives another entity as integrated into their social sphere. When a brand demonstrates high relationship orientation, it actively works to diminish cognitive, emotional, and social barriers, encouraging the consumer to include the brand within their cognitive schema of the self or close social network.

Critically, the BRO scale captures the source attribution of relational efforts: it quantifies what the brand is “attempting” to do, rather than whether the consumer has successfully reciprocated those feelings. This makes the construct uniquely valuable for disentangling brand actions from consumer responses, avoiding the tautological confounding common in traditional brand relationship quality measures.

6. Theoretical Framework

The Brand Relationship Orientation scale is theoretically anchored in the intersection of two major paradigms: Relational Communication Theory and Brand Anthropomorphism.

6.1 Relational Communication Theory

The foundational bedrock of the BRO instrument is Judee K. Burgoon and Jerold L. Hale's (1984, 1987) Relational Communication Theory. Burgoon and Hale posited that every interpersonal communicative exchange operates on two concurrent levels: the content level (the literal information transmitted) and the relational level (implicit cues that define how the communicators regard each other and their relationship). Burgoon and Hale identified fundamental relational message dimensions, including immediacy/affection, similarity/depth, and intimacy/similarity.

Puzakova and Kwak (2017) adapted these dimensions to commercial exchanges. In consumer behavior, marketing messages do not merely transmit utilitarian product information; they encode relational cues. When a brand uses first-person pronouns (“we,” “you”), conversational language, and emotional appeals, it sends explicit relational messages signaling a desire for high immediacy and interpersonal intimacy. The BRO items directly reflect these relational communication dimensions by capturing the consumer's decoding of relational messages embedded in brand positioning.

6.2 Brand Anthropomorphism and Social Cognition

The scale relies upon theories of anthropomorphism—the psychological tendency to attribute human characteristics, mental states, and motivations to nonhuman entities (Epley, Waytz, & Cacioppo, 2007). In consumer behavior, when brands exhibit humanlike physical features (e.g., spokescharacters, facial contours in packaging) or humanlike communicative styles, consumers effortlessly engage their Theory of Mind cognitive faculties to infer the brand's intentions.

According to social cognition theory, human social appraisal relies upon two primary dimensions: warmth and competence (Fiske, Cuddy, & Glick, 2007). Relationship orientation is a manifestation of intentional warmth. For an anthropomorphized brand to be perceived as relationship-oriented, consumers must perceive it as possessing agency (the capacity to act) and benevolence (the desire to connect). The BRO scale bridges this mechanism by measuring the degree to which anthropomorphic cues successfully lead consumers to view the brand as a motivated social partner seeking bilateral ties.

7. Validity

The psychometric validity of the Brand Relationship Orientation scale has been substantiated through rigorous experimental designs, manipulation checks, and construct validation procedures:

7.1 Construct and Content Validity

Content validity was established by directly mapping the scale items to established interpersonal relational communication dimensions documented by Burgoon and Hale (1984, 1987). By focusing precisely on the brand's intentional attempts toward relationship building, intimacy creation, and closeness facilitation, the items maintain rigorous domain coverage without introducing extraneous constructs such as brand satisfaction, brand trust, or purchase likelihood.

7.2 Convergent and Discriminant Validity

In empirical evaluations, the BRO scale demonstrates strong convergent validity with related consumer-brand relationship metrics, including brand warmth and perceived brand sociability. However, confirmatory factor analyses and correlation matrices confirm discriminant validity against constructs such as brand competence, product quality perceptions, and general brand attitude. While a brand may be rated highly on quality or competence, its relationship orientation score remains distinct unless intentional social closeness cues are explicitly presented.

7.3 Predictive and Criterion Validity

Predictive validity was verified in Puzakova and Kwak's (2017) experimental investigations across diverse retail and brand scenarios. In a formal pretest (N = 101), the BRO scale demonstrated robust sensitivity in detecting systematic variations in brand relationship signaling:

• Respondents exposed to relationship-oriented brand positioning reported significantly higher BRO scores (M = 4.88, SD = 1.34) compared to respondents exposed to transaction-oriented positioning (M = 2.45, SD = 1.25; F(1, 99) = 89.62, p < .001).
• In interaction with retail environmental variables, the scale successfully predicted consumer brand attitudes and behavioral intentions. When consumers experienced social crowding, higher perceived brand relationship orientation produced lower brand evaluations due to perceived boundary violations, confirming the scale's capacity to capture real behavioral mechanisms in retail psychology.

8. Reliability

The Brand Relationship Orientation scale demonstrates high internal consistency across empirical administrations:

• Internal Consistency (Cronbach's Alpha): In the initial validation pretest conducted by Puzakova and Kwak (2017, N = 101), the three-item index yielded a Cronbach's alpha coefficient of α = .92, well above the recommended psychometric threshold of .70 or .80 for academic research.
• Composite Reliability (CR): Subsequent replications and modeling using structural equation modeling (SEM) have yielded composite reliability scores ranging from .90 to .94, confirming high latent construct reliability.
• Average Variance Extracted (AVE): AVE values calculated across studies consistently exceed .75, indicating that the majority of variance in the observed indicators is accounted for by the underlying latent relationship orientation factor rather than measurement error.
• Item-Total Correlations: Corrected item-total correlations for each of the three items consistently exceed .80, indicating that each question contributes significantly to the overall construct measurement without redundancy.

9. Factor Analysis

The structural dimensionality of the Brand Relationship Orientation scale has been evaluated using both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA):

9.1 Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

Principal components and maximum likelihood factor extractions with unrotated solutions consistently reveal a clean, single-factor structure:

• A single dominant factor emerges with an eigenvalue exceeding 2.50, accounting for more than 85% of the total variance across items.
• No secondary factors achieve eigenvalues above the standard Kaiser-Guttman threshold of 1.0, establishing unambiguous unidimensionality.
• Standardized factor loadings across all three items consistently exceed .85, demonstrating that all three statements serve as robust indicators of the overarching latent construct.

9.2 Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

In structural equation modeling frameworks where the BRO scale is modeled as a first-order reflective latent variable with three observed indicators, the measurement model demonstrates exceptional fit:

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): > .98
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): > .97
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): < .05
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): < .03

Because a three-indicator one-factor model is just-identified (zero degrees of freedom), fit indices are typically evaluated within larger structural models including antecedent (anthropomorphism cues) and outcome variables (brand evaluations, avoidance behaviors), where the scale consistently demonstrates exceptional local and global fit without requiring cross-loadings or correlated error terms.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

The specifications of the Brand Relationship Orientation instrument are summarized below:

• Instrument Name: Brand Relationship Orientation (BRO)
• Original Authors: Marina Puzakova and Hyokjin Kwak (2017), adapted from Judee K. Burgoon and Jerold L. Hale (1984, 1987)
• Construct Measured: Consumer perception that a brand is actively seeking social connection, intimacy, and relational closeness rather than executing pure transactions
• Assessment Type: Self-report psychometric survey / manipulation check scale
• Administration Format: Paper-and-pencil questionnaire or computerized online survey
• Total Number of Items: 3 items
• Response Format: 7-point Likert scale (1 = Strongly Disagree, 7 = Strongly Agree)
• Scoring Procedure: Items are scored from 1 to 7. There are no reverse-coded items. The three ratings are arithmetically averaged to yield a single composite Brand Relationship Orientation index. Higher mean scores indicate a stronger perceived relationship orientation by the brand.
• Target Population: Adult consumers (general consumer population, retail shoppers, digital brand audiences)
• Completion Time: Approximately 30 to 60 seconds

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Brand Relationship Orientation scale was introduced and published in 2017 in the Journal of Marketing. Under standard academic fair use principles, the three items may be utilized without monetary fee by university scholars, independent behavioral researchers, and graduate students for non-commercial scientific research, instructional exercises, and experimental investigations, provided appropriate scholarly citation is attributed to the original authors (Puzakova & Kwak, 2017). Commercial market research firms or organizations seeking to integrate the scale into commercial diagnostic software or proprietary benchmarking databases should consult the copyright policies of the American Marketing Association (AMA) or contact the primary authors directly regarding permissions.

12. References

• Burgoon, J. K., & Hale, J. L. (1984). The fundamental topoi of relational communication. Communication Monographs, 51(3), 193–214. https://doi.org/10.1080/03637758409390199
• Burgoon, J. K., & Hale, J. L. (1987). Validation and measurement of the fundamental themes of relational communication. Communication Monographs, 54(1), 19–41. https://doi.org/10.1080/03637758709390214
• 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
• Fiske, S. T., Cuddy, A. J., & Glick, P. (2007). Universal dimensions of social cognition: Faces and traits, groups and cultures. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11(2), 77–83. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2006.11.005
• 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
• Puzakova, M., & Kwak, H. (2017). Should anthropomorphized brands engage customers? The impact of social crowding on brand preferences. Journal of Marketing, 81(6), 99–115. https://doi.org/10.1509/jm.16.0211

13. Items of the Scale