Constructs

Marketing scholarship rests on three pillars. The first is the construct domain: the unobservable concepts (e.g., satisfaction, trust, perceived value, brand equity) that theories are built from. A construct is not a thing in the world but an abstraction we infer from observable indicators, which is why the central problems of this pillar are definitional (what is the concept, and how does it differ from its neighbors?) and psychometric (does our measure actually capture it?). The other two pillars (i.e., the real-world phenomena of the substantive domains and the inferential machinery of methodology) only do work once the constructs they connect are well specified.

This part begins with the construct-versus-variable distinction and its measurement theory, then works through the major construct families marketing theorizes with, one chapter each. It opens with the evaluative judgment of customer satisfaction; turns to the relational constructs of trust, commitment, and loyalty; then to the pre-purchase evaluative constructs of perceived quality, value, and risk; then to the brand-and-self constructs of brand equity, personality, attachment, love, and identification; then to the participatory constructs of involvement, engagement, and word of mouth; and closes at the frontier, with emerging constructs such as customer experience, psychological ownership, brand authenticity, consumer responses to AI, privacy concern, and access-based consumption. Throughout, the test of a good construct is the one Cronbach and Meehl set in 1955: a network of lawful relations dense enough that the construct earns its place in the theory, and a measure whose validity and reliability can be demonstrated, not assumed.