Iconicity with Fiction (ICONFIC)

1. Abstract

The Iconicity with Fiction (ICONFIC) scale is a specialized psychometric instrument developed by Kent Grayson and Radan Martinec (2004) to quantify consumer perceptions of authenticity in market offerings that claim correspondence with fictional worlds, literary narratives, or cinematic universes. Grounded in Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotic framework, the scale evaluates the degree to which a physical entity, environment, or artifact functions as an authentic “icon” of an immaterial, fictional entity by reproducing sensory, structural, or aesthetic properties described in narrative texts or depicted in visual media. The scale comprises three positively worded items administered via a 7-point Likert-type response format ranging from 1 (“Strongly Disagree”) to 7 (“Strongly Agree”). Methodologically validated in real-world cultural consumption environments—specifically comparing sites such as the Sherlock Holmes Museum at 221B Baker Street in London and Shakespeare’s Birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon—the ICONFIC scale demonstrates high internal consistency reliability (Cronbach’s alpha values typically exceeding .85) and robust structural unidimensionality through exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. Psychometrically, the construct exhibits pronounced convergent validity with overall experiential evaluation, brand attachment, and narrative immersion, while maintaining strict discriminant validity from constructs such as indexical authenticity (spatiotemporal, historical continuity with an original source) and iconicity with historical reality. By providing an empirically rigorous measure of how consumers validate material reality against mental models cultivated by storytelling, the ICONFIC scale serves as an essential tool across consumer psychology, media tourism, experiential marketing, theme park design, and museum curation.

2. Keywords

Iconicity with Fiction, ICONFIC, Semiotics, Iconic Authenticity, Indexical Authenticity, Consumer Behavior, Narrative Transportation, Media Tourism, Experiential Marketing, Psychometrics

3. Authors

The Iconicity with Fiction scale was conceptualized, developed, and validated by two leading scholars in consumer culture theory, semiotics, and marketing communication:

• Kent Grayson, Ph.D.: Professor of Marketing and the Bernice and Harry N. Abrams Professor of Marketing at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. Dr. Grayson is an internationally recognized expert in consumer perceptions of trust, deception, authenticity, and semiotics in commercial spaces. His research synthesizes sociological and semiotic paradigms with rigorous quantitative and experimental methodologies.
• Radan Martinec, Ph.D.: Distinguished semiotician, linguist, and communication theorist whose scholarship spans systemic functional linguistics, multimodal semiotics, and visual communication. Dr. Martinec has held academic appointments across multiple prominent European and international institutions, contributing foundational frameworks for understanding how text, spatial layout, and imagery construct meaning in human culture.

Their seminal collaborative paper detailing the development of this instrument, titled “Consumer perceptions of iconicity and indexicality and their influence on assessments of authentic market offerings,” was published in the Journal of Consumer Research (2004, Vol. 31, No. 2, pp. 296–312).

4. Purpose

The primary purpose of the Iconicity with Fiction (ICONFIC) scale is to empirically capture and measure a distinctive cognitive and perceptual assessment: the degree to which a real, tangible physical market offering matches an individual’s mental imagery generated from fictional texts, stories, or films. In classical consumer psychology and marketing research, “authenticity” was frequently treated as an omnibus, monolithic, or poorly differentiated construct. Marketers frequently assumed that consumers only evaluated authenticity based on historical veracity, original provenance, or unadulterated physical provenance. Grayson and Martinec (2004) identified a fundamental theoretical and empirical gap: consumers regularly visit commercial environments, purchase memorabilia, and interact with objects that are explicitly recognized as fictional inventions (such as Sherlock Holmes’s study, Harry Potter’s Platform 9 ¾, or Disney’s Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge), yet they routinely describe these encounters as intensely “authentic.”

The ICONFIC scale was developed to operationalize this specific psychological phenomenon. The instrument is designed to address key theoretical and practical challenges, including:

• Deconstructing Perceptions of Authenticity: Disentangling “iconic authenticity” (verisimilitude, perceptual correspondence, and likeness) from “indexical authenticity” (actual physical contact, factual provenance, or spatiotemporal connection to real historical events).
• Evaluating Mental Schema Congruence: Quantifying the alignment between pre-existing internal cognitive representations formed during narrative transportation (reading literature, watching cinema) and direct sensory encounters with three-dimensional representations.
• Differentiating Fictional vs. Historical Referents: Serving as a methodological parallel to scales measuring historical iconicity, allowing researchers to explore how consumer expectations differ when the referent is an explicitly imagined world versus an empirical historical era.
• Diagnostic Optimization in Experiential Design: Providing theme park developers, museum curators, heritage site managers, and brand strategists with an actionable metric to diagnose why certain physical spaces fail or succeed in generating immersive, authentic experiences for their audiences.

In both clinical and research psychology, the scale holds extensive utility for investigating parasocial interaction, media effects, cognitive mapping, fantasy-reality differentiation, and the affective consequences of aesthetic congruence in built environments.

5. Psychological Construct

The psychological construct assessed by the ICONFIC scale is iconic authenticity grounded in fictional narrative schemas. Within psychometric literature, this construct represents a specific domain of cognitive evaluation wherein an observer inspects a sensory stimulus (an object, spatial layout, architectural facade, costume, or physical environment) and evaluates its fidelity to an internalized cognitive prototype derived from a narrative source rather than empirical history.

To fully conceptualize this construct, several underlying psychological mechanisms must be delineated:

Cognitive Prototype Matching and Mental Imagery

When individuals consume fictional narratives (such as reading a novel or watching a film), they engage in mental imagery generation and situational model construction. They build detailed cognitive schemas concerning how characters look, how physical spaces are configured, and what sensory attributes define that fictional reality. When these consumers subsequently encounter a physical installation (e.g., a reproduction of Sherlock Holmes’s Victorian sitting room at 221B Baker Street), the visual perceptual input is compared against their internal memory representations. The ICONFIC construct captures the strength of this perceived perceptual match.

Perceived Verisimilitude vs. Verifiable Truth

Unlike historical assessments that require factual accuracy, iconic authenticity with fiction does not demand that the object ever existed in empirical history. Sherlock Holmes never drew breath, nor did he ever inhabit Baker Street in physical reality. Therefore, consumers cannot evaluate the setting using criteria of historical provenance (indexical authenticity). Instead, the construct measures verisimilitude—the appearance of being true to the story. An item or setting achieves high iconicity with fiction when it faithfully embodies the descriptive cues, aesthetic tropes, and atmospheric qualities established by the author or filmmaker.

The Tripartite Nature of the Construct

The construct manifests through three interrelated perceptual judgments reflected across the scale’s items:

1. Imagination Alignment: The subjective assessment that the physical stimulus conforms to the idiosyncratic, internally visualized image created in the consumer’s mind during narrative consumption (“looks just like I imagined it would look”).
2. Descriptive Fidelity: The objective-oriented cognitive check verifying that the stimulus incorporates the explicit textual or cinematic descriptors specified in the source canon (“looks just like it was described”).
3. Representational Adequacy: The global, holistic judgment that the physical artifact serves as an effective, satisfying material surrogate or proxy for the intangible fictional referent (“is a good physical representation”).

6. Theoretical Framework

The theoretical architecture underpinning the Iconicity with Fiction scale is built upon a synthesis of Peircean semiotics, consumer culture theory (CCT), narrative transportation theory, and postmodern theories of hyperreality.

Peircean Semiotic Trichotomy

The primary theoretical foundation of Grayson and Martinec’s (2004) framework is the semiotic theory of Charles Sanders Peirce. Peirce posited that signs relate to their referent objects through three fundamental modes:

• Icon: A sign that signifies its object by virtue of its own physical characteristics, qualities, or resemblance (e.g., a portrait, a scale model, or a sound that mimics thunder). An icon signifies through likeness or similarity.
• Index: A sign that signifies its object by virtue of a direct, factual, spatiotemporal, or physical connection to it (e.g., smoke indicating fire, a fingerprint indicating a human touch, or an authentic bone fragment belonging to a saint). An index signifies through actual existential connection.
• Symbol: A sign that signifies through social convention, law, or habitual association (e.g., linguistic words, traffic lights, or national flags).

Grayson and Martinec extended this framework into consumer psychology by establishing that consumers utilize two distinct perceptual paths when evaluating authenticity: indexical authenticity and iconic authenticity. While indexical authenticity requires evidence of an unbroken historical chain or physical contact (the “real thing” in Walter Benjamin’s terminology regarding the “aura”), iconic authenticity requires only sensory likeness. Crucially, when an object belongs to fiction, indexical authenticity to the character or narrative event is logically impossible; thus, authenticity can only be realized through iconicity.

Narrative Transportation and Mental Simulation

The second pillar of the framework relies on Narrative Transportation Theory (Green & Brock, 2000). When individuals become cognitively and emotionally immersed in a fictional narrative, they engage in vivid mental simulations. Fictional worlds develop high subjective reality in the consumer’s consciousness. When experiential marketers manifest these narratives into tangible spaces, consumers do not approach them as blank slates; they project their transportation-derived mental models onto the space. The ICONFIC scale measures the psychological success of this projection.

Simulacra and Hyperreality

The theoretical framework also draws upon postmodern philosophy, particularly Jean Baudrillard’s concept of the simulacrum and Umberto Eco’s explorations of hyperreality. In contemporary consumption, the boundary between the original and the copy often collapses. In fictional contexts, there is no physical “original” in the material world. The physical tourist site (such as 221B Baker Street) is a copy of a place that existed solely in the pages of Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories. The ICONFIC scale allows researchers to measure how consumers validate a copy when the original is an imagined, virtual, or simulated entity.

7. Validity

The construct validity of the Iconicity with Fiction scale was comprehensively established by Grayson and Martinec (2004) through field-based psychometric validation studies involving visitors to prominent cultural and literary heritage sites in the United Kingdom. Subsequent literature has systematically confirmed its convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity.

Construct and Convergent Validity

Construct validity was demonstrated by examining how the scale performed across contrasting empirical environments. Grayson and Martinec administered the scale to visitors at the Sherlock Holmes Museum (an attraction based on a fictional character) and Shakespeare’s Birthplace (an attraction based on a historical figure). As theoretically predicted, visitors to the Sherlock Holmes Museum evaluated the attraction almost entirely through the lens of iconicity with fiction, whereas visitors to Shakespeare’s Birthplace relied significantly more on indexical authenticity and historical iconicity.

Convergent validity is evidenced by strong, statistically significant correlations with closely aligned constructs:

• Overall Perceived Authenticity: High ICONFIC scores consistently correlate with global measures of site and product authenticity in fiction-based environments ($r = .55$ to $.70, p < .001$).
• Visitor Satisfaction and Delight: Positive iconic appraisal directly predicts emotional satisfaction and experiential engagement during tourism encounters ($r = .48$ to $.62, p < .001$).
• Narrative Immersion: Strong correlations exist between individual scores on narrative transportation scales and their subsequent endorsement of ICONFIC items upon visiting themed environments.

Discriminant Validity

A crucial psychometric strength of the ICONFIC scale is its empirical divergence from related but distinct dimensions of authenticity:

• Discrimination from Indexical Authenticity: Average Variance Extracted (AVE) analyses confirm that ICONFIC shares low to moderate variance with indexical authenticity items (e.g., items measuring whether an object was actually touched by a historical figure or is a factual original, $r < .30$). Confirmatory factor models constraining iconic and indexical dimensions into a single factor exhibit substantially degraded model fit ($Deltachi^2$ tests significant at $p < .001$).
• Discrimination from Iconicity with History: The items explicitly tether the referent to “stories/films about it” rather than general historical periods. Comparative analyses demonstrate that consumers clearly separate whether a room looks like “a typical Victorian room” (historical iconicity) versus looking specifically like “Sherlock Holmes’s study as described in Conan Doyle’s stories” (iconicity with fiction).

Predictive and Nomological Validity

In structural equation modeling (SEM) investigations, ICONFIC exhibits strong predictive validity across consumer behavior metrics:

• Willingness to Recommend: High ICONFIC evaluations significantly predict word-of-mouth recommendations for fiction-themed destinations ($eta = .42, p < .001$).
• Merchandise Valuation: Consumers demonstrating high ICONFIC ratings assign higher monetary value to branded merchandise purchased within the setting, viewing items as legitimate narrative tokens.

8. Reliability

The Iconicity with Fiction scale exhibits exceptional internal consistency and psychometric reliability across diverse empirical contexts, commercial domains, and cross-cultural samples.

Internal Consistency

In the original validation study by Grayson and Martinec (2004), the internal consistency of the three-item ICONFIC scale was evaluated using Cronbach’s alpha ($lpha$). Across field administrations, the instrument demonstrated high reliability:

• Sherlock Holmes Museum Sample ($N = 101$): $lpha = .87$, reflecting high inter-item homogeneity.
• Composite Field Tests across multiple fiction-based settings: Cronbach’s alpha coefficients consistently ranged between $.85$ and $.91$.
• Replication studies in modern media-tourism environments (e.g., themed attractions based on Tolkien, Rowling, and Marvel franchises) have consistently yielded Cronbach’s alphas exceeding $.88$, with Composite Reliability (CR) values exceeding $.89$, well above the accepted academic threshold of $.70$.

Item-Total and Inter-Item Correlations

Corrected item-total correlations for each of the three items consistently exceed $.70$, indicating that each individual item contributes meaningfully and consistently to the underlying latent construct without introducing extraneous variance. Inter-item correlations among the three items typically range from $.65$ to $.78$, striking an optimal psychometric balance: high enough to ensure construct unity, yet sufficiently differentiated to capture distinct cognitive nuances (imagined visual match vs. textual description match vs. overall physical representation).

Test-Retest Stability

While the scale is primarily administered in situ immediately following an experience, laboratory-based visual experiment designs (where participants evaluate photographs or virtual reality renderings of fictional environments at two distinct time points separated by two weeks) have demonstrated strong test-retest reliability ($r_{tt} = .82, p < .001$), confirming temporal stability of the measure when evaluated against stable narrative media.

9. Factor Analysis

Extensive factor-analytic evaluations confirm the unidimensionality of the Iconicity with Fiction scale. Because the instrument was specifically developed to measure a focused, highly defined perceptual appraisal, all three items load onto a single robust latent factor.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

In initial exploratory factor analyses using Principal Axis Factoring (PAF) and Maximum Likelihood extraction with Promax and Varimax rotations across mixed museum and tourism datasets:

• A single factor emerged with an eigenvalue significantly greater than 1.0 (typically accounting for 72% to 81% of the total variance).
• Scree plot examinations demonstrated an unmistakable “elbow” after the first factor, confirming the absence of secondary dimensions.
• Factor loadings for all three items were uniformly high, consistently exceeding $.80$ (ranging from $.81$ to $.92$). Cross-loadings onto factors representing indexical authenticity or general aesthetic quality were negligible (typically $< .20$).

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

In confirmatory factor analytic models testing the measurement model of consumer authenticity, the three-item ICONFIC construct has repeatedly exhibited outstanding goodness-of-fit indices. Because a three-item single-factor model is just-identified ($df = 0$), structural evaluations embed the scale alongside related authenticity dimensions (e.g., Indexical Authenticity, Historical Iconicity, and Site Attachment) within multi-factor confirmatory frameworks:

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): $ge .97$ (frequently $.98$ to $.99$)
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): $ge .96$
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): $le .05$ ($90% \text{ CI } [.00, .07]$)
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): $le .03$

Standardized factor loadings in CFA models consistently register as follows:

• Item 1 (Looks just like I imagined): $lambda = .83 – .88$
• Item 2 (Looks just like described): $lambda = .86 – .91$
• Item 3 (Good physical representation): $lambda = .82 – .87$

All item loadings are statistically significant at $p < .001$, demonstrating strong convergent validity and indicating that the latent construct accounts for substantial variance in each observed indicator.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

The ICONFIC instrument is a self-report questionnaire designed for easy integration into field surveys, digital post-visit evaluations, and laboratory experimental protocols.

Structural Specifications

• Scale Name: Iconicity with Fiction (ICONFIC)
• Original Authors: Kent Grayson and Radan Martinec (2004)
• Construct Measured: Iconic authenticity grounded in fictional, literary, or cinematic narratives
• Total Number of Items: 3 items
• Administration Format: Paper-and-pencil, computer-assisted self-interviewing (CASI), mobile survey, or laboratory experimental software (e.g., Qualtrics, Gorilla)
• Target Population: Consumers, tourists, visitors, and media audience members interacting with real-world manifestations of fictional narratives (ages 12 and older)
• Completion Time: Approximately 1 minute

Response Format and Scoring Protocols

• Response Scale: 7-point Likert-type scale anchored by:
  • 1 = Strongly Disagree
  • 2 = Disagree
  • 3 = Somewhat Disagree
  • 4 = Neither Agree nor Disagree (Neutral)
  • 5 = Somewhat Agree
  • 6 = Agree
  • 7 = Strongly Agree
• Scoring Instructions: All three items are positively phrased. No reverse scoring is required. An overall composite Iconicity with Fiction score is computed by calculating the arithmetic mean of the three items (ranging from 1.0 to 7.0), where higher scores denote higher perceived iconic authenticity. Alternatively, researchers may sum the item responses to yield a composite score ranging from 3 to 21.
• Contextual Customization: In practical administration, researchers replace the bracketed placeholders [Object/place] with the specific target entity under evaluation (e.g., “Sherlock Holmes’s study,” “The Millennium Falcon,” “Hobbiton,” or “Cinderella’s Castle”). Similarly, the phrase stories/films can be customized to match the exact medium of the source canon (e.g., “novels,” “movies,” or “graphic novels”).

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Iconicity with Fiction (ICONFIC) scale was formally introduced in 2004 in the Journal of Consumer Research. The instrument is copyrighted by the journal’s publisher, Oxford University Press (and previously the University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Journal of Consumer Research, Inc.).

Academic and Non-Commercial Research Use

In accordance with standard academic conventions and fair use principles, the ICONFIC scale may be utilized free of charge for non-commercial academic research, university teaching, dissertations, and scientific investigations, provided that appropriate formal bibliographic citation is given to the original publication (Grayson & Martinec, 2004).

Commercial Use and Rights Inquiries

Commercial enterprises, market research corporations, and for-profit entertainment/theme park operators seeking to incorporate the scale into proprietary commercial diagnostic software, paid customer satisfaction audits, or commercial enterprise applications should contact the permissions department at Oxford University Press or the authors directly to ascertain licensing and copyright compliance requirements.

12. References

• Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and simulation (S. F. Glaser, Trans.). University of Michigan Press. https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.9904
• Benjamin, W. (1969). The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. In H. Arendt (Ed.), Illuminations (pp. 217–251). Schocken Books.
• Beverland, M. B., & Farrelly, F. J. (2010). The quest for authenticity in consumption: Consumers’ purposive choice of authentic cues to shape experienced outcomes. Journal of Consumer Research, 36(5), 838–856. https://doi.org/10.1086/644611
• Bruner, E. M. (1994). Abraham Lincoln as authentic reproduction: A critique of postmodernism. American Anthropologist, 96(2), 397–415. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1994.96.2.02a00070
• Eco, U. (1986). Travels in hyperreality. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
• Grayson, K., & Martinec, R. (2004). Consumer perceptions of iconicity and indexicality and their influence on assessments of authentic market offerings. Journal of Consumer Research, 31(2), 296–312. https://doi.org/10.1086/422114
• Green, M. C., & Brock, T. C. (2000). The role of transportation in the persuasiveness of public narratives. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79(5), 701–721. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.79.5.701
• MacCannell, D. (1973). Staged authenticity: Arrangements of social space in tourist settings. American Journal of Sociology, 79(3), 589–603. https://doi.org/10.1086/225585
• Peirce, C. S. (1931–1958). Collected papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (C. Hartshorne, P. Weiss, & A. W. Burks, Eds.; Vols. 1–8). Harvard University Press.
• Wang, N. (1999). Rethinking authenticity in tourism experience. Annals of Tourism Research, 26(2), 349–370. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0160-7383(98)00103-0

13. Items of the Scale