Development of a customer-based brand competitiveness scale

This study develops a scale to measure customer-based brand competitiveness (CBBC), defined as customers’ perceptions of a brand’s outperformance of competing brands. Drawing on signalling theory, this study empirically investigates brand equity and purchase intentions as consequences of CBBC. The scale development process comprises three stages, with two qualitative and three quantitative studies. An initial pool of 36 items, generated from a literature review and qualitative interviews with 20 consumers in the scale construction stage, is reduced to seven items in the scale refinement stage with 21 academic branding experts. The final scale validation stage, comprising a total of 1,157 consumers and 2,078 brand evaluations across five industries, confirms the reliability, validity, and unidimensionality of the seven-item CBBC scale. Structural equation modelling shows the superiority of the new scale, which represents a more powerful yet parsimonious tool to measure brand competitiveness, making it a validated, widely applicable instrument that can be efficiently utilised in academia and practice.