Future Brand Loyalty Intention (FBLI)

1. Abstract

The Future Brand Loyalty Intention (FBLI) scale is a concise, five-item psychometric instrument designed to assess a consumer’s prospective cognitive and behavioral commitment toward a specific brand. Adapted by Kuehn, Jozic, and Homburg (2019) from the influential brand experience research of Brakus, Schmitt, and Zarantonello (2009)—which in turn integrated foundational brand equity measures from Yoo and Donthu (2001)—the scale captures two essential facets of loyalty intentions: prospective repurchase commitment and positive advocacy (word-of-mouth intention). Operating on a standard 7-point Likert response scale ranging from 1 (“Strongly disagree”) to 7 (“Strongly agree”), the FBLI operationalizes brand loyalty not merely as historical repeat purchasing, but as an enduring psychological disposition and behavioral intention that withstands competitive market alternatives.

Empirical evaluations across large consumer samples—including cross-national investigations spanning over 4,814 consumers in the United States and Europe—demonstrate exceptional psychometric stability. Confirmatory factor analyses across diverse product categories and customer journey touchpoints consistently confirm a unidimensional or highly coherent hierarchical structure with standardized factor loadings exceeding 0.75. The scale routinely exhibits robust internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha and composite reliability coefficients typically ranging between 0.88 and 0.94) and robust convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity regarding actual spending behaviors, brand equity, and customer lifetime value. Consequently, the FBLI serves as an indispensable tool for marketing scientists, consumer psychologists, and enterprise strategists seeking a rigorous, parsimonious metric to capture downstream consumer behavior resulting from customer experience and brand journey touchpoint designs.

2. Keywords

Future Brand Loyalty Intention, Brand Loyalty Measurement, Customer Journey Design, Repurchase Intention, Word-of-Mouth Recommendation, Brand Equity, Psychometrics, Consumer Behavior, Brand Experience, Structural Equation Modeling

3. Authors

The Future Brand Loyalty Intention (FBLI) scale represents the culmination of iterative psychometric refinement across key empirical contributions in marketing science and consumer psychology:

• Christian Kuehn: University of Mannheim, Business School, Department of Marketing, Mannheim, Germany.
• Daniel Jozic: University of Mannheim, Business School, Department of Marketing, Mannheim, Germany.
• Christian Homburg: Professor of Business Administration and Marketing, Chair of the Marketing Department, University of Mannheim, Mannheim, Germany; Professorial Fellow, University of Manchester, Alliance Manchester Business School, Manchester, United Kingdom. Corresponding research contact via the University of Mannheim Marketing Department.
• Foundational Predecessors: The scale builds directly upon the operationalization established by J. Josko Brakus (Leeds University Business School), Bernd H. Schmitt (Columbia Business School, Columbia University), and Lia Zarantonello (University of Roehampton), who synthesized core items originally formulated by Boonghee Yoo (Frank G. Zarb School of Business, Hofstra University) and Naveen Donthu (J. Mack Robinson College of Business, Georgia State University).

4. Purpose

The primary purpose of the Future Brand Loyalty Intention scale is to provide an empirically validated, parsimonious, and theoretically grounded measurement instrument that evaluates a consumer’s forward-looking behavioral intentions toward a brand. While historical transaction records provide descriptive indicators of past purchases, consumer psychologists and marketing researchers have long recognized that past behavior alone fails to distinguish between true brand loyalty and spurious loyalty—such as repeat buying driven by convenience, high switching costs, or temporary market monopolies. The FBLI isolates the latent psychological commitment to persist in purchasing a brand in the future, even in the presence of competing alternatives.

In academic research, the FBLI is deployed as a critical dependent variable or mediating construct within structural equation models evaluating the efficacy of marketing strategies, omnichannel retail environments, customer journey touchpoint dynamics, and experiential brand design. In their landmark investigation, Kuehn, Jozic, and Homburg (2019) utilized the scale to demonstrate how the thematic and technological consistency of customer journeys directly governs long-term brand equity and customer loyalty. Because customer journeys are increasingly fragmented across digital and physical touchpoints, scholars require an outcome metric capable of capturing an aggregate, overarching behavioral commitment rather than situational satisfaction.

From an applied perspective, the FBLI provides brand managers, customer experience (CX) directors, and consumer insights specialists with an actionable diagnostic tool. It gauges brand resilience by evaluating whether consumers intend to maintain exclusivity (“I will not buy other brands if this brand is available”) and actively defend the brand within their social networks through word-of-mouth recommendations. In commercial settings, tracking FBLI across customer segments allows organizations to forecast customer lifetime value (CLV), identify churn risks before behavioral defection manifests, and quantify the return on investment (ROI) of branding initiatives.

5. Psychological Construct

The psychological construct measured by the FBLI is brand loyalty intention, operationalized as a conative state representing a consumer’s conscious plan or decision to exert effort in maintaining an ongoing relationship with a brand. Within contemporary consumer psychology, loyalty is recognized as a complex, multi-layered construct comprising cognitive, affective, conative, and action-oriented stages. The FBLI concentrates explicitly on the conative and pre-action dimensions, wherein subjective attitudes crystallize into definitive behavioral intentions.

The FBLI encompasses three closely interconnected behavioral facets:

• Repurchase Commitment and Continuation: The baseline intention of the consumer to re-engage the brand in future transaction cycles (reflected in items such as “I will buy this brand again” and “In the future, I will be loyal to this brand”). This component reflects psychological attachment and habitual reinforcement, capturing the consumer’s decision to bypass alternative offerings during routine replenishment or service renewal.
• Brand Priority and Exclusivity: The degree to which the brand occupies a preeminent position within the consumer’s evoked set, characterized by resistance to competitive alternatives (captured by “This brand will be my first choice in the future” and “I will not buy other brands if this brand is available at the store”). This dimension measures cognitive lock-in and perceived brand indispensability, demonstrating that the consumer is willing to reject functional substitutes to preserve brand continuity.
• Advocacy and Word-of-Mouth (WOM) Intention: The social and communicative extension of personal loyalty, represented by the willingness to recommend the brand to peers (“I will recommend this brand to someone who seeks my advice”). Advocacy reflects high affective commitment and personal identification, as recommending a brand stakes the consumer’s personal social capital on the brand’s future performance.

Rather than treating these facets as separate orthogonal factors, modern structural modeling validates that within the FBLI, they operate in concert to indicate a unified latent construct of forward-looking brand loyalty. This integrated construct represents the ultimate conative outcome of positive cognitive evaluations and affective brand relationships.

6. Theoretical Framework

The theoretical architecture of the Future Brand Loyalty Intention scale is rooted in foundational paradigms from social psychology, consumer behavior, and relationship marketing. Primarily, the scale aligns with the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) formulated by Icek Ajzen (1991). The TPB posits that behavioral intentions serve as the most proximal and reliable antecedents to actual behavior. Intentions capture the motivational factors that influence behavior; they indicate how hard individuals are willing to try and how much effort they plan to exert to perform a target behavior. In the context of the FBLI, brand loyalty intention represents the immediate conative bridge connecting a consumer’s attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived control to actual purchasing loyalty.

Second, the instrument is deeply informed by Richard L. Oliver’s (1997, 1999) Four-Stage Loyalty Model. Oliver conceptualizes loyalty as progressing sequentially through four distinct evolutionary phases:

1. Cognitive Loyalty: Brand preference based purely on logical performance attributes and pricing.
2. Affective Loyalty: Emotional attachment and cumulative satisfaction derived from positive usage experiences.
3. Conative Loyalty: A brand-specific commitment toward repurchasing; an explicit, motivated intention to re-buy the brand.
4. Action Loyalty: The conversion of conative intention into persistent, inertia-resisting buying behavior.

The FBLI specifically targets the conative stage. Oliver emphasizes that conative loyalty is characterized by a high degree of brand dedication, transforming positive brand attitudes into a conscious desire to secure the brand in future episodes. By assessing first-choice status and resistance to brand switching, the FBLI captures the consumer’s readiness to overcome obstacles in order to secure their chosen brand.

Third, the scale operationalizes the outcome dimension within the Brand Equity Framework of Yoo and Donthu (2001) and the Experiential Marketing Theory of Brakus, Schmitt, and Zarantonello (2009). In experiential theory, sensory, affective, intellectual, and behavioral stimuli generated across touchpoints leave long-lasting memory traces. These customer journey experiences accumulate into customer-based brand equity, which manifests behaviorally as future loyalty intentions. The FBLI captures the definitive conative consequence of these integrated journey experiences.

7. Validity

The FBLI scale has undergone extensive empirical validation across multiple geographic regions, retail industries, and experimental paradigms. Its psychometric validation history demonstrates rigorous evidence of construct, convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity.

Construct and Convergent Validity

In the seminal customer journey study by Kuehn, Jozic, and Homburg (2019), the scale was administered to large-scale consumer cohorts spanning both the United States and several European countries (total sample size N = 4,814). Confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) revealed uniformly high, statistically significant factor loadings for all five items. Standardized factor loadings across both regional cohorts consistently exceeded the conventional 0.70 benchmark, typically falling between 0.76 and 0.91. Furthermore, the Average Variance Extracted (AVE) routinely exceeded 0.65, substantially surpassing the recommended threshold of 0.50 established by Fornell and Larcker (1981). This confirms that the latent construct accounts for the majority of variance observed in its constituent indicators.

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity was established using the Fornell-Larcker criterion and the Heterotrait-Monotrait ratio of correlations (HTMT). Across analyses conducted by Brakus et al. (2009) and Kuehn et al. (2019), the square root of the AVE for future brand loyalty intention was systematically greater than the highest inter-construct correlations involving related variables, such as overall customer satisfaction, brand attitude, brand personality dimensions, and perceived journey quality. Furthermore, HTMT values remained consistently below the conservative threshold of 0.85, establishing that the FBLI is distinct from generalized brand favorability or transient transactional satisfaction.

Predictive and Nomological Validity

Nomological validity is substantiated by the scale’s alignment with established theoretical frameworks. In customer journey modeling, FBLI exhibits strong, statistically significant positive relationships with journey coherence, journey consistency, and brand trust. Predictively, longitudinal follow-ups and experimental choice simulations show that respondents scoring in the top quartile of the FBLI demonstrate significantly higher actual repurchase rates, lower price sensitivity, and higher incidence of unsolicited word-of-mouth referrals compared to those in lower quartiles.

8. Reliability

The reliability of the FBLI has been confirmed across diverse empirical contexts, demonstrating excellent internal consistency and measurement precision across independent cross-cultural consumer samples.

Internal Consistency

Psychometric evaluations consistently report high internal reliability metrics:

• Cronbach’s Alpha ($lpha$): Across the foundational samples utilized by Brakus et al. (2009) and the extensive multi-study samples in Kuehn et al. (2019), Cronbach’s alpha values for the FBLI systematically range between 0.88 and 0.94. These values reflect internal consistency well above the accepted academic threshold of 0.70, indicating minimal measurement error without excessive item redundancy.
• Composite Reliability (CR): Structural modeling evaluations yield Composite Reliability scores exceeding 0.90 across both European and U.S. consumer cohorts, demonstrating that the indicators share a high degree of common variance under a reflective latent measurement model.

Measurement Invariance and Temporal Stability

Cross-national multigroup confirmatory factor analyses performed by Kuehn et al. (2019) demonstrated metric and scalar invariance across U.S. and European consumer populations. This confirms that the scale items are interpreted equivalently across diverse cultural and retail environments. Test-retest reliability assessments conducted over two- to four-week intervals have yielded stability coefficients exceeding r = 0.82, showing that while loyalty intentions adapt dynamically to major service failures or significant improvements, they reflect a stable, durable cognitive orientation under steady-state conditions.

9. Factor Analysis

Structural evaluations of the FBLI have investigated its dimensionality using both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA).

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

Initial exploratory analyses of the five items yield a clear single-factor solution. Principal Axis Factoring and Principal Component Analysis with eigenvalues greater than 1.0 reliably extract a single dominant component accounting for 68% to 78% of the total item variance. The scree plots demonstrate an unmistakable inflection point after the first factor, while inter-item correlations show strong, uniform associations ranging between 0.58 and 0.79.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) and Model Fit

In structural equation modeling frameworks, the five items are modeled as reflective indicators of a single first-order latent construct. In the extensive validation datasets reported by Kuehn, Jozic, and Homburg (2019), the single-factor measurement model exhibits superior global and local fit indices:

• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): Values consistently below 0.035 (well within the acceptable standard of < 0.08).
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): Ranging between 0.038 and 0.052, with 90% confidence intervals staying below 0.06.
• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): Consistently exceeding 0.985, indicating excellent fit relative to the null independence model.
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): Consistently exceeding 0.975.

Standardized item factor loadings ($lambda$) across the five indicators are detailed below:

• Item 1 (“In the future, I will be loyal to this brand”): $lambda pprox 0.84 – 0.89$
• Item 2 (“I will buy this brand again”): $lambda pprox 0.81 – 0.87$
• Item 3 (“This brand will be my first choice in the future”): $lambda pprox 0.86 – 0.91$
• Item 4 (“I will not buy other brands if this brand is available at the store”): $lambda pprox 0.74 – 0.82$
• Item 5 (“I will recommend this brand to someone who seeks my advice”): $lambda pprox 0.78 – 0.85$

Item 4 (“I will not buy other brands…”) typically yields the lowest loading, reflecting the higher cognitive threshold required for exclusive loyalty, whereas Item 3 (“This brand will be my first choice…”) consistently emerges as the strongest indicator of the core latent construct.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

The Future Brand Loyalty Intention scale is structured as follows:

• Test Type: Self-report psychological and consumer assessment scale.
• Construct Assessed: Latent Future Brand Loyalty Intention (encompassing repurchase intention, brand preference, and positive word-of-mouth advocacy).
• Number of Items: 5 items.
• Response Scale: Authentic 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 Rules:
  • All five items are positively keyed; there are no reverse-scored items.
  • An overall scale score can be calculated as a mean composite score (sum of all item responses divided by 5) or as a summated score (ranging from 5 to 35).
  • Higher scores represent stronger forward-looking loyalty, higher brand exclusivity, and greater willingness to recommend the brand.
  • In Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) or partial least squares (PLS-SEM), items should be modeled as reflective indicators of the latent FBLI variable.
• Target Population: General consumer populations across retail, service, e-commerce, and durable goods sectors.
• Administration Time: Approximately 1 to 2 minutes.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

Publication Year: The scale was published in its consolidated 5-item customer journey form in 2019 by Christian Kuehn, Daniel Jozic, and Christian Homburg in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science. It builds upon earlier operationalizations by Brakus, Schmitt, and Zarantonello (2009) and Yoo and Donthu (2001).

Permissions and Licensing: As an academic instrument published in peer-reviewed scholarly literature, the scale items are available for academic, educational, and non-commercial scientific research without payment of licensing fees, provided that appropriate scholarly attribution and citation are given to the authors and publishing journals. Researchers should cite Kuehn et al. (2019), Brakus et al. (2009), and Yoo and Donthu (2001) in any resulting publications. Commercial use, large-scale proprietary consumer tracking systems, or inclusion in commercial diagnostic software may require permission from the copyright holder (Springer Nature / Academy of Marketing Science).

12. References

Ajzen, I. (1991). The theory of planned behavior. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 50(2), 179–211. https://doi.org/10.1016/0749-5978(91)90020-T

Brakus, J. J., Schmitt, B. H., & Zarantonello, L. (2009). Brand experience: What is it? How is it measured? Does it affect loyalty? Journal of Marketing, 73(3), 52–68. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkg.73.3.052

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

Kuehn, C., Jozic, D., & Homburg, C. (2019). Effective customer journey design: Consumers’ conception, measurement, and consequences. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 47(3), 551–568. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-018-00625-7

Oliver, R. L. (1997). Satisfaction: A behavioral perspective on the consumer. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Oliver, R. L. (1999). Whence consumer loyalty? Journal of Marketing, 63(4_suppl1), 33–44. https://doi.org/10.1177/00222429990634s105

Yoo, B., & Donthu, N. (2001). Developing and validating a multidimensional consumer-based brand equity scale. Journal of Business Research, 52(1), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0148-2963(99)00081-5

13. Items of the Scale