Tailor-made single-item measures of doubly concrete constructs

The present study addresses how to measure three constructs commonly used in advertising research, namely attitude towards the ad, brand attitude and brand purchase intention. The study replicates and extends Bergkvist and Rossiter’s (2007) finding that single-item measures are equally predictively valid as multiple-item measures of basic (doubly concrete – see Rossiter’s 2002 C-OAR-SE procedure) constructs in marketing, namely A_Ad and A_Brand. One extension is that the finding holds for free-standing, tailormade single-item measures, whereas the previous study establishes this result only for single-item measures extracted from multiple-item measures. Another extension is that single-item equivalence of predictive validity further holds for another widely employed dependent variable construct, PI_Brand. The present study goes beyond Bergkvist and Rossiter’s study in that it shows that items commonly used in multiple-item measures of A_Ad and A_Brand vary in their predictive validity and that, in some cases, the differences are substantial. The main finding is the further empirical proof that multiple-item scales are unnecessary for validly measuring basic constructs.