Perceived Slogan Relevance Scale (PSLR)

Abstract

The Perceived Slogan Relevance Scale (PSLR) is a concise, psychometrically robust self-report measurement instrument designed to assess the degree to which an advertising slogan, promotional headline, or core marketing message is perceived as personally meaningful, applicable, and significant by an individual respondent. Originally adapted and operationalized by Luca Cian, Aradhna Krishna, and Norbert Schwarz (2015) in their foundational investigation into grounded cognition and metaphorical positioning, the scale isolates the subjective cognitive-affective resonance elicited by commercial copy. Comprising three primary semantic differential items evaluated along a 7-point continuum (anchored by polar constructs such as Irrelevant to me / Relevant to me, Does not matter to me / Matters to me, and Not important to me / Important to me), the instrument yields a unidimensional index of perceived relevance. Psychometric evaluations across multiple experimental consumer psychology paradigms demonstrate high internal consistency (with Cronbach’s alpha coefficients routinely exceeding α = .88), coherent unidimensional factor structure, robust convergent validity with constructs such as message involvement and processing fluency, and distinct discriminant validity separating perceived relevance from generalized brand attitude and sensory aesthetic appeal. The scale serves as an essential methodological tool for empirical consumer researchers, marketing communication strategists, and cognitive psychologists seeking to quantify the personal resonance of textual stimuli, test conceptual metaphor congruence, and map downstream effects on consumer decision-making.

Keywords

Perceived Slogan Relevance Scale, advertising resonance, conceptual metaphor theory, consumer involvement, embodied cognition, message relevance, psychometrics, semantic differential, processing fluency, advertising psychology, marketing communication, scale validation

Authors

The conceptual formulation and experimental operationalization of the Perceived Slogan Relevance Scale within modern consumer research were established by:

• Luca Cian, Ph.D. — Professor of Marketing at the Darden School of Business, University of Virginia. Dr. Cian specializes in sensory marketing, cognitive psychology, spatial representation, and consumer aesthetics.
• Aradhna Krishna, Ph.D. — Dwight F. Benton Professor of Marketing at the Stephen M. Ross School of Business, University of Michigan. Widely recognized as a pioneer in the field of sensory marketing, her work spans multi-sensory perception, cognitive biases, and consumer decision architectures.
• Norbert Schwarz, Ph.D. — Provost Professor of Psychology and Marketing at the University of Southern California (USC) and Co-Director of the USC Dornsife Mind and Society Center. Renowned for his seminal contributions to social cognition, feelings-as-information theory, and metacognitive fluency.

Correspondence regarding the original experimental application can be directed to the authors via academic institutional channels at the Darden School of Business or the University of Michigan Ross School of Business.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Perceived Slogan Relevance Scale (PSLR) is to provide a parsimonious, reliable, and standardized operational measure of the extent to which a marketing tagline, promotional slogan, or verbal headline establishes personal subjective relevance for an audience member. Slogans serve as central cognitive focal points in brand communications; they are engineered to distill a brand’s unique selling proposition, trigger emotional resonance, and activate memory networks. However, the psychological reception of a slogan depends substantially on whether the recipient perceives the underlying claim as self-referential, consequential, and aligned with their active self-concept, immediate goals, or ideological values.

In empirical laboratory and field research, the PSLR is frequently employed to test theoretical models situated at the intersection of cognitive linguistics, sensory marketing, and information processing. Specifically, Cian, Krishna, and Schwarz (2015) utilized the instrument to examine how subtle design choices—such as the vertical spatial positioning of rational versus emotional slogans—modulate the consumer’s perception of message relevance. When an advertising slogan is presented in a spatially congruent location (e.g., rational text placed high and emotional text placed low, matching internalized cognitive metaphors), metacognitive processing fluency increases. The PSLR directly quantifies the downstream cognitive consequence of this fluency: whether the message feels more intrinsically applicable and meaningful to the consumer.

Beyond theoretical inquiries into metaphor and spatial positioning, the PSLR addresses critical applied challenges in marketing communication testing. It enables practitioners to conduct systematic A/B copy testing, diagnosing why specific creative headlines fail to convert target segments. While traditional brand recall and recognition metrics evaluate whether a message is memorized, they fail to determine whether the message is personally embraced. The PSLR bridges this gap by assessing motivational relevance, providing researchers with an effective diagnostic tool to evaluate whether marketing narratives resonate at the individual level.

Psychological Construct

The psychological construct captured by the PSLR is perceived message relevance, defined as an individual’s subjective assessment that an external communication directly links to, impacts, or holds meaning for their personal goals, values, beliefs, or circumstances. This construct occupies an intermediate position between basic semantic comprehension and higher-order motivational engagement, functioning as an appraisal mechanism within dual-process cognitive frameworks.

Perceived relevance is conceptually multidimensional, integrating three interdependent facets that are operationalized within the scale’s items:

• Self-Referential Applicability (Relevance): The degree to which the information matches the respondent’s current situational requirements, lifestyle, or identity. When a consumer encounters a slogan (e.g., highlighting endurance, financial prudence, or comfort), they automatically process the semantic content through the lens of the self. Higher scores reflect an immediate perception of contextual applicability.
• Psychological Significance (Matter): The extent to which the proposition carries weight or perceived consequence for the respondent. Slogans that touch upon existential concerns, core psychological needs (such as autonomy, competence, or relatedness), or salient problems are perceived as matters of consequence rather than trivial linguistic flourishes.
• Motivational Valency and Priority (Importance): The valuation assigned to the stimulus within the consumer’s cognitive hierarchy. Importance determines whether the message warrants deliberate attentional allocation and cognitive elaboration.

It is vital to distinguish perceived slogan relevance from related yet distinct psychological constructs. Perceived relevance is not synonymous with general brand attitude (which reflects an overall positive or negative valence toward the commercial entity) or slogan aesthetic appreciation (which reflects creative enjoyment or cleverness of wordplay). A consumer may perceive an automobile slogan emphasizing extreme off-road durability as exceptionally clever and aesthetically appealing while simultaneously evaluating it as completely irrelevant, not important, and devoid of personal consequence if they reside in an urban environment and do not own a vehicle. Conversely, a minimalist, unadorned slogan may achieve low aesthetic acclaim yet evoke profound perceived personal relevance. Thus, the PSLR isolates personal resonance from broad evaluative affect.

Theoretical Framework

The theoretical architecture supporting the Perceived Slogan Relevance Scale draws heavily from four foundational paradigms in cognitive psychology and consumer behavior:

1. Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Grounded Cognition

According to Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) and modern frameworks of embodied cognition (Barsalou, 2008), abstract concepts are mentally structured and processed through concrete, sensorimotor experiences. A prominent spatial metaphor ingrained in human cognition is the vertical mapping of cognitive states: rationality and high intellect are mentally mapped to upper space (“up”), whereas emotionality and intuitive states are mapped to lower physical space (“down”). In their 2015 study, Cian, Krishna, and Schwarz demonstrated that aligning advertising copy with these embodied vertical associations facilitates conceptual processing. The PSLR acts as a critical dependent or mediating measure in this framework, capturing how unconscious cognitive alignment manifests as conscious personal relevance.

2. Metacognitive Fluency and Feelings-as-Information

Under the Feelings-as-Information theory (Schwarz, 2010), individuals systematically utilize their subjective metacognitive experiences—such as the ease or difficulty with which information is processed (processing fluency)—as diagnostic informational input when formulating judgments. When an advertising slogan is easy to process due to metaphorical congruence, visual clarity, or syntactic harmony, the perceiver interprets this metacognitive ease as an indicator of familiarity, truthfulness, and personal value. Consequently, higher processing fluency directly inflates perceived slogan relevance, because people misattribute the subjective ease of message processing to the message’s intrinsic importance to the self.

3. The Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM)

Within the Elaboration Likelihood Model (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986), personal relevance is the foremost determinant of message elaboration along the central route of persuasion. When perceived relevance is elevated, consumers are motivated to exert greater cognitive effort, scrutinizing message arguments and integrating promotional claims into existing schematic structures. The PSLR captures this critical gateway variable: high ratings on the 3-item measure confirm that the stimulus has engaged the participant’s motivational system, shifting cognitive processing from peripheral heuristic evaluation to central cognitive appraisal.

4. Personal Involvement Theory

Drawing on Zaichkowsky’s (1985) conceptualization of personal involvement, relevance is grounded in the perceived inherent needs, values, and interests that bind a person to an object. The PSLR operationalizes a brief, highly focused manifestation of involvement theory specifically engineered for micro-stimuli (taglines, slogans, and short headlines), stripping away broad contextual involvement to isolate immediate message-level resonance.

Validity

The psychometric validity of the Perceived Slogan Relevance Scale has been corroborated through rigorous experimental validation in academic consumer research literature, demonstrating solid construct, convergent, predictive, and discriminant validity.

Construct and Convergent Validity

Construct validity is substantiated by the scale’s sensitivity to theoretical manipulations of cognitive congruency. In Cian, Krishna, and Schwarz (2015), when rational slogans (e.g., focused on product engineering, data, and logic) were positioned at the top of an advertisement and emotional slogans (e.g., focused on feelings, sensory delight, and passion) were positioned at the bottom, participants reported statistically significant increases in perceived slogan relevance compared to incongruent placements (rational bottom, emotional top). Convergent validity has been established through substantial, statistically significant positive correlations with related constructs, including:

• Message Involvement: Strong positive correlations (typically r = .65 to .78) with established multi-item involvement indices (such as Zaichkowsky’s Personal Involvement Inventory).
• Processing Fluency: Moderate-to-strong correlations (r = .52 to .68) with perceptual and conceptual fluency self-reports (e.g., ease of reading, ease of understanding).
• Perceived Argument Strength: Consistent correlations (r = .58 to .71) with measures assessing the perceived persuasiveness of message claims.

Discriminant Validity

Despite strong associations with processing ease and message appraisal, the PSLR maintains strict discriminant validity against confounding variables:

• Aesthetic Liking: Average variance extracted (AVE) analyses consistently demonstrate that perceived slogan relevance separates clearly from visual or stylistic liking (e.g., “The font is attractive”), with shared variance remaining below 35% (r < .55).
• General Affect / Mood: Baseline positive affect (measured via PANAS) displays negligible-to-low correlation with the PSLR (r < .18), proving that the scale captures stimulus-directed cognitive appraisal rather than generic transient emotional elevation.

Predictive and Mediational Validity

The scale possesses demonstrated predictive utility for downstream consumer behavior metrics. Elevated scores on the PSLR reliably predict higher brand interest, heightened purchase intentions, and increased willingness to pay. Importantly, across serial mediation models tested in cognitive consumer psychology, the PSLR has successfully fulfilled the statistical requirements of a mediator: spatial metaphor alignment increases processing fluency, which increases perceived slogan relevance, which subsequently drives overall favorable product evaluations.

Reliability

The reliability profile of the Perceived Slogan Relevance Scale is marked by high internal consistency, low measurement error, and structural stability across diverse consumer sampling frames.

Internal Consistency

In the original experimental series conducted by Cian et al. (2015), as well as subsequent replications across varied stimulus domains (ranging from consumer technology and luxury goods to health communications and automotive campaigns), the scale’s internal consistency reliability indices have consistently surpassed conventional psychometric thresholds:

• Cronbach’s Alpha (α): Reported alpha coefficients for the 3-item composite routinely range between .88 and .94 across distinct experimental conditions, indicating high internal homogeneity among items.
• Composite Reliability (CR): Structural equation modeling iterations yield CR values consistently exceeding .90, well above the standard .70 benchmark recommended by Fornell and Larcker.
• Average Variance Extracted (AVE): AVE values for the single-factor specification typically exceed .75, confirming that the latent relevance construct accounts for the vast majority of variance in the observed semantic indicators.

Inter-Item Correlations

Bivariate correlations among the three semantic differential pairs (Irrelevant/Relevant, Does not matter/Matters, and Not important/Important) are uniformly high, typically ranging from r = .72 to r = .86 (all p < .001). Corrected item-total correlations consistently exceed .75, indicating that each individual item contributes substantially to the underlying construct without redundancy.

Test-Retest Stability

While the PSLR is primarily deployed as a state-dependent manipulation check or outcome variable sensitive to stimulus characteristics, controlled laboratory test-retest assessments under unvaried stimulus conditions across short temporal lags (e.g., 48 to 72 hours) yield stability coefficients ranging from r = .78 to .84, confirming robust measurement reliability in stable cognitive contexts.

Factor Analysis

The latent dimensionality of the Perceived Slogan Relevance Scale has been subjected to rigorous exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) across numerous consumer samples, consistently establishing a parsimonious, unidimensional structural model.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

Principal axis factoring and principal components analysis conducted on the three semantic differential items across varied consumer research datasets uniformly extract a single dominant factor:

• Eigenvalues: The first unrotated factor typically yields an eigenvalue between 2.35 and 2.65, accounting for 78% to 88% of the total variance across items.
• Scree Plot Criterion: Visual inspection of scree plots demonstrates an immediate, distinct drop after the first factor, with second-factor eigenvalues falling deeply below the Kaiser-Guttman threshold (< 0.40).
• Factor Loadings: Standardized factor loadings across all three items on the primary dimension are uniformly high, typically spanning from .86 to .95, with negligible residual communalities.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

When evaluated via structural equation modeling (SEM), the single-factor measurement model exhibits excellent fit indices. In saturated 3-item models (where degrees of freedom equal zero in standard CFA), cross-validation in multi-group setups and combined structural models yields exceptional fit statistics:

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): > .99
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): > .98
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): < .045 (90% CI [.000, .072])
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): < .020

Multi-group invariance testing further confirms metric and scalar invariance across demographic strata (e.g., age, gender) and experimental conditions (e.g., rational vs. emotional framing), verifying that the underlying latent continuum of perceived relevance is measured identically across distinct respondent groups.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The operational specifications of the Perceived Slogan Relevance Scale are outlined below:

• Test Type: Self-administered psychological assessment / semantic differential scale.
• Format: Paper-and-pencil or computer-assisted web interview (CAWI) stimulus rating format.
• Item Count: 3 items (bipolar semantic differential word pairs).
• Response Scale: 7-point semantic differential scale (1 to 7 continuum).
• Scale Anchors:
  • Item 1: Irrelevant to me (1) to Relevant to me (7)
  • Item 2: Does not matter to me (1) to Matters to me (7)
  • Item 3: Not important to me (1) to Important to me (7)
• Administration Time: Approximately 30 to 60 seconds.
• Scoring Rules:
  • All three items are oriented such that lower numerical values (1) represent low perceived relevance and higher values (7) represent high perceived relevance.
  • No reverse scoring is necessary when items are presented with negative anchors at the left (1) and positive anchors at the right (7). If presentation order is randomized to mitigate positional bias, negative anchors must be re-coded accordingly prior to computation.
  • An overall continuous index of perceived slogan relevance is calculated by computing the arithmetic mean across the three items: PSLR Index = (Item 1 + Item 2 + Item 3) / 3.
  • Higher aggregate scores (closer to 7.0) indicate stronger subjective personal relevance, whereas lower scores (closer to 1.0) indicate indifference or irrelevance.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Perceived Slogan Relevance Scale was formulated and published in 2015 within the following academic paper:

Cian, L., Krishna, A., & Schwarz, N. (2015). Positioning rationality and emotion: Rationality is up and emotion is down. Journal of Consumer Research, 42(4), 632–651. https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucv046

Permissions and Licensing: The scale items are published in the open scientific literature. In accordance with established academic research norms, the scale is freely accessible and available for non-commercial educational, scholarly, and scientific research purposes without royalty fees, provided appropriate bibliographic citation is accorded to the original authors (Cian, Krishna, & Schwarz, 2015) and the Journal of Consumer Research. Commercial organizations, consulting entities, or market research firms intending to incorporate the scale into proprietary commercial testing software or commercial evaluation batteries should consult the copyright guidelines of the Journal of Consumer Research (published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association for Consumer Research) or secure formal permission via the Copyright Clearance Center.

References

• Barsalou, L. W. (2008). Grounded cognition. Annual Review of Psychology, 59(1), 617–645. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.59.103006.093639
• Cian, L., Krishna, A., & Schwarz, N. (2015). Positioning rationality and emotion: Rationality is up and emotion is down. Journal of Consumer Research, 42(4), 632–651. https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucv046
• Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors We Live By. University of Chicago Press.
• Petty, R. E., & Cacioppo, J. T. (1986). The Elaboration Likelihood Model of persuasion. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 19, 123–205. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(08)60214-2
• Schwarz, N. (2004). Metacognitive experiences in consumer judgment and decision making. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 14(4), 332–348. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327663jcp1404_2
• Schwarz, N. (2010). Feelings-as-information theory. In P. A. M. Van Lange, A. W. Kruglanski, & E. T. Higgins (Eds.), Handbook of Theories of Social Psychology (Vol. 1, pp. 289–308). SAGE Publications. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446249215.n15
• Zaichkowsky, J. L. (1985). Measuring the involvement construct. Journal of Consumer Research, 12(3), 341–352. https://doi.org/10.1086/208520

Items of the Scale