An Application of Vanishing Tetrad to a Brand Model

Aaker¿s (1995) seminal work in constructing a scale to measure brand personality has reinvigorated research in this area. Her work and those that have subsequently used the brand personality scale have followed conventional analysis procedures (exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis) and typically assume a reflective structure. In this study we consider the possibility that trait indicants could be better conceived as formative measures rather than reflective ones. A review of the literature in the structural equation modeling domain and also the literature on human personality has suggested that researchers have not paid sufficient attention to such issues. In the personality area the paper responds to the call of key psychometricians (Bollen and Lennox, 1991; Jarvis, MacKenzie and Podsakoff, 2003) to consider these issues indepth. We apply Vanishing Tetrad Analysis (Ting, 1995) to different levels of brand personality within a broader brand relationship structural model to assess the merits of a formative modeling approach in this area. The Tetrad analyses and further structural modeling establish that brand personality is best treated as having a reflective specification.