Customer-based brand competitiveness: a scale development

Brand competitiveness as a brand’s outperformance of competing brands is receiving growing attention. However, in-depth examinations of the construct, e.g., concerning a clear theoretical underpinning for its relevance, perspective, and potential consequences, remain missing. In relation to its measurement, existing empirical investigations only use improvised or ad hoc scales, which limits attempts to establish generalised knowledge about the construct. Like other brand performance measures that fail to incorporate competition, brand competitiveness scales also do not reflect the definition as a relative construct. This study introduces customer-based brand competitiveness (CBBC) as a customer’s evaluation of a brand’s outperformance of competing brands. It draws on signalling theory to provide a theoretical underpinning for the construct’s relevance, develops a scale to measure CBBC and empirically investigates brand equity and purchase intentions as consequences of CBBC. According to signalling theory, brand competitiveness, which conveys to customers that the brand outperforms its competitors, communicating past and present success, acts as a signal of future success, indicating the brand will keep its promises and meet customer needs better than its competitors. Brand competitiveness thus affects customer decision-making and result in differential responses to the brand’s marketing, compared with competing brands, i.e., customer-based brand equity. This signal reduces customers’ uncertainty, positively affecting their purchase intentions and loyalty. The scale development process comprises three stages, with two qualitative and three quantitative studies. An initial pool of 36 items is generated from a literature review and qualitative interviews with 20 consumers in the scale construction stage. The scale refinement stage with 21 academic branding experts results in a reduced pool of seven items. The scale validation stage with a total of 1,157 consumers, resulting in 2,078 brand evaluations across five industries, confirms the reliability, validity, and unidimensionality of the seven-item CBBC scale. Its seven items refer to the outperformance of competing brands by providing superior products and quality, delivering better on brand promises, addressing customer needs more effectively, having a better reputation, and being the best brand and the leader in the product category. Structural equation modelling confirms that the CBBC scale outperforms the existing BC measure in explaining customer-based brand equity and purchase intentions. It thus represents a more powerful yet parsimonious tool to measure brand competitiveness, making it a valida, widely applicable instrument that can be efficiently utilised in academia and practice.