Content area
Full Text
An executive summary for managers and executive readers can be found at the end of this issue.
1. Introduction
Research on consumer-brand relationships has long recognized the important role that brand trust plays in building brand equity, customer loyalty and brand commitment (Chaudhuri and Holbrook, 2001; Delgado-Ballester, 2004; Veloutsou et al. , 2013). Recent studies have especially demonstrated the significant impact of brand trust on online purchases and evangelistic behavior toward a brand (Al-Nasser et al. , 2014; Becerra and Badrinarayanan, 2013). Despite the importance of brand trust, different perspectives still exist concerning the nature of the focal construct and its measurement, especially the relationship between overall trust and its various dimensions.
The unidimensional perspective describes brand trust in a global fashion and operationalizes it as a first-order construct that can be measured directly with reflective items. However, this approach ignores the conceptual richness of brand trust and may yield an incomplete portrayal of the construct (Delgado-Ballester, 2004). Based on the assumption that trust is a target-specific phenomenon (Mayer et al. , 1995; Singh and Sirdeshmukh, 2000), Li et al. (2008) advance a multidimensional perspective and argue that consumer trust may exist at multiple levels: overall trust in the brand and trust in specific aspects of the brand. Following Jarvis et al. (2003) who regard trust as a second-order construct, Li and his colleagues (2008) distinguished overall trust from trust with regard to specific aspects (dimensions) of a brand (trust in a brand's competence and/or benevolence). Then, they embedded the unidimensional components within overall trust and proposed an alternative measurement model of brand trust. The alternative model specifies brand trust as an aggregate construct (Law and Wong, 1999; Law et al. , 1998) or a second-order construct, namely, a composite formed from its dimensions because "the dimensions combine to produce the construct" (Edwards, 2001, p. 147). With a set of survey data, Li and his colleagues empirically tested the proposed model. The test provides favorable results, confirming that brand trust as a multidimensional construct can be specified as a second-order factor with its dimensions being its formative indicators.
The findings of Li and his colleagues are important to research on brand trust with regard to both its conceptualization and measurement. However, the stability and robustness...