What is to be expected? Optimizing the operationalization of consumer–brand relational norms

Abstract

Consumers relate to brands in ways analogous to how they relate with people. And, just as consumers have norms that guide their interpersonal relationships, they also have norms that guide their relationships with brands. While such relational norms are essential in determining brand value, extant literature offers no measure to effectively operationalize the framework that governs consumer–brand relationships. Preliminary work offers important insight but suffers from several methodological shortcomings, rendering subsequent empirical applications problematic and hindering theoretical and practical advancements. In seven studies (ntotal = 3121), we revisit seminal work on the consumer–brand relational norms construct to refine and validate its measurement. Our findings reveal a unidimensional set of items that display strong psychometric properties, offering a parsimonious measure that promotes consistent operationalizations of the construct across studies and enables comparison and integration of empirical results.