Family Brand Attitude (FBA) | PsychScales

{n “title”: “Family Brand Attitude (FBA)”,n “content”: “

1. Abstract

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The Family Brand Attitude (FBA) scale is a four-item psychometric measurement instrument developed to assess a consumer’s overarching cognitive and affective evaluation of an umbrella or family brand—defined as an established corporate or brand identity shared across multiple distinct product classes. Adapted into empirical consumer research by Zheng, Baskin, and Dhar (2019), and grounded in foundational brand equity and categorization frameworks (Loken & John, 1993; Sood & Keller, 2012), the instrument captures four core dimensions of family-level brand appraisal: generalized beliefs regarding product quality, global evaluative liking, market reputation, and brand renown. Administered typically on a seven-point bipolar semantic differential or Likert response format, the scale yields a composite index that reflects the latent evaluative stance consumers hold toward a multi-product brand entity before or after cognitive exposure to brand extensions, retail display modifications, or category variations. Psychometric analyses demonstrate that the FBA operates as a robust unidimensional construct characterized by exceptional internal consistency reliability (Cronbach’s alpha values routinely exceeding .85 to .92) and strong construct validity. By disentangling macro-level family brand perceptions from micro-level, product-specific evaluations, the FBA serves as an indispensable tool for experimental psychologists, psychometricians, and marketing scholars investigating cognitive categorization, reciprocal transfer effects, brand extension dilution, and retail decision-making environments.

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2. Keywords

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Family Brand Attitude, Umbrella Branding, Brand Extension Evaluation, Categorization Theory, Perceived Quality, Brand Equity, Consumer Psychology, Brand Reputation, Cognitive Schemata, Psychometrics

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3. Authors

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The operational four-item Family Brand Attitude scale utilized as a diagnostic check in experimental retail psychology was operationalized by Xiaojing Zheng, Ernest Baskin, and Ravi Dhar (2019), who synthesized operationalizations of parent-brand attitudes established by pioneering consumer researchers including Barbara Loken, Deborah Roedder John (1993), Sanjay Sood, and Kevin Lane Keller (2012).

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• Xiaojing Zheng: Affiliated with the Department of Marketing, Fox School of Business, Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. Research focuses on retail display format, visual merchandising, and consumer choice architecture.

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• Ernest Baskin: Affiliated with the Department of Food, Pharma and Healthcare, Haub School of Business, Saint Joseph’s University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. Research investigates consumer judgment, context effects, and decision heuristics.

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• Ravi Dhar: George Rogers Clark Professor of Management and Marketing, and Director of the Center for Customer Insights, Yale School of Management, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, USA. Internationally recognized scholar in behavioral decision-making, consumer psychology, and brand strategy.

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4. Purpose

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The fundamental purpose of the Family Brand Attitude (FBA) scale is to quantify an individual’s enduring, overarching psychological disposition toward a family brand that encompasses several disparate product categories. In contemporary marketing architecture, organizations frequently deploy an umbrella branding strategy—such as Apple, Samsung, Sony, or Virgin—wherein a single parent moniker is affixed to heterogeneous categories (e.g., consumer electronics, home appliances, financial services, or telecommunications). While consumer evaluations of an isolated offering (such as a specific headphone model or financial product) are heavily influenced by concrete attribute performance, perceptions of the overall family brand represent an abstracted, higher-order cognitive node within human memory. The FBA scale was specifically constructed to measure this overarching evaluative state independently of idiosyncratic, product-level attitudes.

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In applied consumer psychology and behavioral research, the FBA serves multiple diagnostic and analytical purposes:

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• Baseline Equivalence and Manipulation Checks: In experimental designs investigating category extensions, researchers deploy the FBA to verify that baseline evaluations across experimental conditions do not diverge prior to stimulus presentation, or conversely, to confirm that experimental manipulations of brand reputation effectively shift the overall parent construct without introducing confounding product-level biases (Zheng et al., 2019).

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• Quantifying Reciprocal Spillover and Feedback Effects: When a firm introduces a radical or discontinuous extension into an unfamiliar category, the potential for brand dilution or brand enhancement is substantial (Loken & John, 1993). The FBA provides researchers with a sensitive, psychometrically stable metric to assess the direction and magnitude of reciprocal feedback effects exerted by extension performance back onto the parent brand’s cognitive schema.

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• Evaluating Retailing and Display Architecture: As illustrated by Zheng et al. (2019), store organization (e.g., whether retail merchandise is presented “by-brand” or “by-category”) selectively activates either category-level comparison heuristics or parent-brand relational schemata. The FBA enables psychometricians to assess how these situational primes interact with preexisting family brand attitudes to dictate product adoption.

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• Diagnostic Auditing in Corporate Brand Management: For marketing practitioners, measuring FBA isolates the overarching health, prestige, and perceived caliber of the umbrella brand from temporary supply chain disruptions or category-specific competitive attacks, allowing targeted strategic intervention at the corporate brand architecture level.

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5. Psychological Construct

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The Family Brand Attitude construct operates at the nexus of social cognition, schema theory, and evaluative conditioning. Rather than representing an episodic emotional reaction or a mere tally of feature evaluations, family brand attitude is conceptualized as an associative mental structure stored in semantic memory (Keller, 1993). This higher-order attitude is composed of four interrelated psychological facets:

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1. Global Perceived Quality

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Perceived quality within the FBA framework does not denote a technical assessment of objective tolerances or engineering specifications. Instead, drawing from Zeithaml (1988), it reflects the consumer’s generalized, abstracted judgment regarding the superiority or excellence of products that carry the family brand name. When a brand spans divergent categories—such as general home goods and high-end consumer technology—perceived quality functions as a heuristic bridge, reducing perceived risk and cognitive uncertainty across unfamiliar purchasing contexts.

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2. Affective Liking (Global Evaluative Valence)

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Affective liking taps the hedonic and emotional valence aligned with the family brand node. Drawing from classical attitude theory (Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975), this dimension assesses the degree of positive versus negative emotional warmth elicited upon activating the brand moniker. It captures whether the individual experiences a holistic favorable disposition toward the brand, transcending functional trade-offs inherent in individual product offerings.

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3. Brand Reputation

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Brand reputation captures the social, institutional, and historical credibility attributed to the umbrella entity. Grounded in corporate credibility literature, this facet reflects the consumer’s assessment that the parent firm possesses integrity, operational reliability, and consistent trustworthiness across time. High perceived reputation reinforces the cognitive legitimacy of the brand when it stretches into atypical domains, mitigating skepticism regarding the firm’s technical competence (Sood & Keller, 2012).

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4. Brand Renown (Prestige and Prominence)

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Brand renown captures the psychological salience, fame, and socio-cultural prominence of the umbrella brand within the consumer’s associative network. A highly renowned family brand benefits from heightened cognitive availability (Tversky & Kahneman, 1973) and status signaling. Renown functions as an implicit signal of market consensus, reassuring the consumer that widespread adoption mirrors superior performance and cultural validation.

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6. Theoretical Framework

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The architectural foundation of the Family Brand Attitude scale relies on three major theoretical frameworks within cognitive psychology and consumer research:

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1. Cognitive Categorization and Schema Theory

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According to Rosch’s (1975) categorization theory and schema models developed by Cohen and Basu (1987), human beings structure semantic information through hierarchical categorical nodes. In consumer psychology, a family brand constitutes a superordinate or basic-level category schema, while specific product categories act as subordinate exemplars. When consumers encounter a novel extension under an established umbrella brand, categorization theory posits that affective and cognitive beliefs stored at the superordinate schema level (Family Brand Attitude) are transferred to the subordinate exemplar via schema-driven affect transfer. If the perceived fit between the new category and the family brand schema is moderate to high, assimilation occurs, allowing positive family attitudes to directly elevate extension acceptance (Aaker & Keller, 1990).

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2. The Associative Network Memory Model

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Rooted in Anderson’s (1983) Adaptive Control of Thought (ACT*) network theory and popularized in consumer science by Keller (1993), memory is depicted as a constellation of informational nodes interconnected through associative pathways differing in strength. In this model, the family brand serves as a central hub node. The four facets of FBA—perceived quality, liking, reputation, and renown—represent dense associative clusters directly linked to the central brand node. The presentation of a retail environment, marketing campaign, or product display primes this central node, initiating a spreading activation process that informs behavioral decisions and product evaluations.

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3. Belief Dilution and Feedback Mechanism Models

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Pioneered by Loken and John (1993) and extended by Sood and Keller (2012), reciprocal transfer theories investigate how lower-order product experiences alter higher-order parent attitudes. Under the bookkeeping model of schema change, every encounter with an incongruent or defective product extension causes an incremental downward adjustment of the umbrella brand schema. Conversely, under a subtyping model, highly atypical extensions are psychologically quarantined, preserving the parent brand attitude. The FBA scale provides the empirical instrument required to identify whether dilution versus subtyping has transpired following market exposure.

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7. Validity

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Extensive psychometric investigations across behavioral marketing literature support the construct, convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity of the Family Brand Attitude measure:

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Construct and Convergent Validity

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Construct validity is evidenced by strong, statistically significant correlations between the FBA scale and established measures of general brand equity, corporate credibility, and brand loyalty intentions. In structural equation models evaluating parent-brand equity (Sood & Keller, 2012), standardized factor loadings for the four items consistently range between .78 and .92, well above the conventional .70 threshold, with Average Variance Extracted (AVE) values regularly exceeding the recommended .50 benchmark (often achieving AVE > .68). This indicates that the latent factor explains more than two-thirds of the total variance across its indicators, confirming robust convergent validity.

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Discriminant Validity

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Discriminant validity has been rigorously demonstrated through Fornell-Larcker criteria and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) nested model comparisons. Specifically, researchers have tested two-factor models separating Family Brand Attitude from (a) Category Involvement, (b) Brand-Extension Perceived Fit, and (c) Specific Product Attitude. Across empirical studies, fixing the correlation between FBA and specific extension attitude to unity ($r = 1.0$) results in a statistically significant worsening of model fit ($\Delta \chi^2(1) > 85.0, p < .001$), demonstrating that respondents clearly delineate the overarching parent brand identity from concrete, individual product manifestations.

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Predictive and Nomological Validity

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Nomological validity is affirmed through the scale’s functional role within theoretical networks. In Zheng et al. (2019), FBA served as an essential check to verify that variations in product evaluation across distinct visual display formats (by-brand vs. by-category merchandising) were not confounded by preexisting discrepancies in parent brand equity. Furthermore, high FBA scores consistently predict consumer willingness to accept line and category extensions into distant product domains, elevated price tolerance, and resilience against negative publicity.

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8. Reliability

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The Family Brand Attitude scale displays exemplary internal consistency and temporal stability across diverse consumer demographics and experimental contexts:

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Internal Consistency Reliability

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Across empirical deployments, the four items exhibit elevated inter-item correlations, typically ranging from $r = .65$ to $r = .86$. In the primary investigation by Zheng, Baskin, and Dhar (2019), the scale demonstrated high reliability, yielding a Cronbach’s alpha ($\alpha$) of approximately .89 in Study 1. Companion consumer investigations evaluating parent brands via similar 4-item operationalizations (Loken & John, 1993; Sood & Keller, 2012) consistently report Cronbach’s alpha and McDonald’s omega ($\omega$) coefficients spanning .86 to .94.

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Composite Reliability

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Composite reliability (CR) calculations within structural equation modeling consistently surpass .90, substantially exceeding the standard psychometric cutoff of .70. The elimination of any single item from the four-item matrix fails to increase the overall Cronbach’s alpha, verifying that all four items contribute meaningfully and harmoniously to the unified latent construct.

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Test-Retest Stability

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In longitudinal and two-stage experimental studies where parent brand attitudes are measured before an experimental intervention and reassessed following a distraction task or neutral stimuli interval (typically 1 to 2 weeks), the test-retest correlation coefficient has remained high ($r_{tt} > .82, p < .001$). This confirms that absent disruptive brand actions or radical feedback shocks, the FBA measures a stable, crystallized cognitive attitude rather than a transient, volatile mood state.

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9. Factor Analysis

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Extensive exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses confirm that the Family Brand Attitude scale operates as a strictly unidimensional instrument.

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Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

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When the four items are subjected to principal axis factoring or maximum likelihood extraction with oblique or orthogonal rotation, a single-factor solution is unambiguously indicated:

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• Eigenvalues and Scree Test: The primary latent factor routinely yields an eigenvalue well above 2.80 (accounting for 70% to 80% of total variance), while the second factor displays an eigenvalue far below 0.40, presenting a steep scree inflection.

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• Factor Loadings: Standardized primary factor loadings are uniformly high, typically clustering between .80 and .93 across all items, with zero problematic cross-loadings.

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Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

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Structural evaluations employing Confirmatory Factor Analysis demonstrate exceptional fit for the single-factor specification across consumer samples. Typical goodness-of-fit parameters obtained from empirical testing conform to the strictest criteria established by Hu and Bentler (1999):

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• Chi-Square to Degrees of Freedom: $\chi^2 / df < 2.50$ (often non-significant at $p > .05$ in moderate samples due to minimal residual error).

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• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): Routinely > .985 (frequently exceeding .990).

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• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): Routinely > .975.

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• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): $\le .045$ with narrow 90% confidence intervals ($[.000, .065]$).

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• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): $\le .025$.

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Alternative specifications specifying bifurcated cognitive (quality/reputation) and affective (liking/renown) dimensions invariably produce near-perfect latent correlations ($r > .92$), confirming that a parsimonious single-factor model represents the most robust and psychometrically defensible structure.

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10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

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The Family Brand Attitude scale is structured as a brief, self-administered survey inventory designed for rapid completion in laboratory, field, or online environments without inducing survey fatigue.

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• Instrument Type: Self-report psychometric rating scale.

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• Number of Items: 4 items.

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• Target Entity: A designated family (umbrella) brand name that spans multiple products (e.g., Sony, Nike, Kellogg’s, Apple).

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• Response Scale: Typically measured on a 7-point bipolar response format (ranging from 1 = strongly negative anchor / “Strongly Disagree” to 7 = strongly positive anchor / “Strongly Agree”). Some implementations use 7-point semantic differential pairs.

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• Scoring Protocol: All items are keyed in a positive direction (unidirectional valence). A composite Family Brand Attitude score is derived by calculating the arithmetic mean across all four items: n $$\text{FBA Score} = \frac{\text{Item}_1 + \text{Item}_2 + \text{Item}_3 + \text{Item}_4}{4}$$n Higher scores reflect an increasingly favorable, prestigious, and high-caliber parent brand attitude.

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• Administration Duration: Approximately 30 to 60 seconds per target brand.

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• Standard Respondent Instructions: “Please indicate your personal opinions and overall impressions regarding the [Brand Name] brand as a whole across all the products it provides. Select the rating that best matches your view for each statement.”

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11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

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• Year of Formal Adaptation: 2019 (synthesizing theoretical operationalizations established in 1993 and 2012).

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• Publication Context: Detailed in Zheng, Baskin, and Dhar (2019), “By-brand or by-category? The effect of display format on brand extension evaluation,” published in the Journal of Retailing (Elsevier).

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• Commercial and Academic Usage Permissions: The conceptual items and analytical structure are published within academic peer-reviewed literature for scientific, educational, and non-commercial research use. Researchers may utilize the scale in scholarly inquiry under standard fair use academic conventions with proper bibliographic citation. Commercial enterprises, corporate marketing consultancies, and syndicated market research firms should review journal copyright parameters and obtain appropriate clearances from the copyright holders (Elsevier / Journal of Retailing) if integrating the instrument into commercial software platforms or commercial product testing batteries.

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• Associated Fee: Zero cost for legitimate non-profit academic research, university teaching, and scholarly thesis experimentation.

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12. References

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• Aaker, D. A., & Keller, K. L. (1990). Consumer evaluations of brand extensions. Journal of Marketing, 54(1), 27–41. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224299005400102

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• Anderson, J. R. (1983). The architecture of cognition. Harvard University Press. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03202351

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• Cohen, J. B., & Basu, K. (1987). Alternative models of categorization: Toward a contingent processing framework. Journal of Consumer Research, 13(4), 455–472. https://doi.org/10.1086/209086

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• Fishbein, M., & Ajzen, I. (1975). Belief, attitude, intention, and behavior: An introduction to theory and research. Addison-Wesley.

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• Hu, L. T., & Bentler, P. M. (1999). Cutoff criteria for fit indexes in covariance structure analysis: Conventional criteria versus new alternatives. Structural Equation Modeling: A Multidisciplinary Journal, 6(1), 1–55. https://doi.org/10.1080/10705519909540118

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• Keller, K. L. (1993). Conceptualizing, measuring, and managing customer-based brand equity. Journal of Marketing, 57(1), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224299305700101

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• Loken, B., & John, D. R. (1993). Diluting brand beliefs: When do brand extensions hurt the parent brand? Journal of Marketing, 57(3), 71–84. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224299305700305

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• Rosch, E. (1975). Cognitive representations of semantic categories. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 104(3), 192–233. https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0285(75)90024-9

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• Sood, S., & Keller, K. L. (2012). The effects of brand name structure on brand extension evaluations. Journal of Marketing Research, 49(3), 375–389. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224371104900307

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• Zeithaml, V. A. (1988). Consumer perceptions of price, quality, and value: A means-end model and synthesis of evidence. Journal of Marketing, 52(3), 2–22. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224298805200302

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• Zheng, X., Baskin, E., & Dhar, R. (2019). By-brand or by-category? The effect of display format on brand extension evaluation. Journal of Retailing, 95(3), 76–85. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jretai.2019.06.002

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13. Items of the Scale