Consumer-company identification: development and validation of a scale

Consumer-Company Identification is a relatively new issue in the marketing academia. Bhattacharya and Sen (2003) explored the Social Identity theory and established Consumer-Company Identification as the primary psychological substrate for deep relationships between the organization and its customers. In the present study a new instrument was constructed and validated that permits the empirical verification of the phenomenon described by Bhattacharya and Sen (2003). The scale validated in the present study is the first to embrace the idiosyncrasies of the identification between consumers and organizations. The process was conducted through 3 independent data collections. The first one was collected using literature search and in-depth interviews with 12 undergraduate students and bachelors from different professional fields. The second data base was obtained from a survey of 226 undergraduate students from 3 universities in 2 big Brazilian cities. This data base was used for purification purposes using Explanatory Factorial Analysis. Finally, the Structural Equation Modeling technique was applied to analyze a third data base composed of 387 observations collected from the same 3 universities of the second study. The results confirm the content, convergent and discriminant validity of the new scale proposed.