Construct · 4 names · 5 citations
Different names. Different fields. One construct. One map.
● jangle · one match, many names Nearest construct by meaningself-brand connectioncompare the meaningsEvery construct on the map is compared with every other by the meaning of its definitions, and the closest one is surfaced here. The nearest construct to self-congruity is self-brand connection.
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Sirgy's 1982 review Self-Concept in Consumer Behavior and the self-congruity theory that grew from it hold that people prefer brands, products, and stores whose image matches their own picture of themselves. The match is worked out across four pictures of the self: the actual self (how a person sees themselves now), the ideal self (how they would like to be), the social self (how they think others see them), and the ideal social self (how they would like others to see them). Congruity was scored as the gap between how a buyer rated a brand's typical user on a set of traits and how they rated themselves on the same traits, so a small gap meant a good fit and predicted preference. This is the parent label for a family of overlapping ideas: what the later direct measure, the actual-versus-ideal work, and the self-brand connection literature each rename is this same match between a consumer's self and a brand's image.[1]
Sirgy and colleagues' 1997 paper Assessing the Predictive Validity of Two Methods of Measuring Self-Image Congruence kept the construct but changed how it is captured. Rather than rating a brand's user and oneself separately and subtracting, respondents judge in one step how well a brand's image fits their own, for example agreeing or disagreeing that the typical user is a lot like them. Sirgy and colleagues reported that this global, direct rating predicted attitudes and choices better than the older gap score, which could be inflated by rating styles and by treating every trait as equally relevant. The referent has not changed, it is still the fit between a buyer's self and a brand's image; only the label, self-image congruence, and the measurement have shifted, which is exactly why the two are so easy to treat as if they were one settled construct.[2]
Malär, Krohmer, Hoyer, and Nyffenegger's 2011 study Emotional Brand Attachment and Brand Personality works with what they call self-congruence: the fit between a brand's personality and the buyer's self. Their contribution was to pull apart the two selves that self-congruity theory had bundled together and ask which one matters more, finding that a match with the actual self, how a person really is, builds emotional attachment more reliably than a match with the ideal self, how they wish to be. The underlying idea, a consumer preferring a brand that looks like them, is the same one Sirgy named; the label has dropped the ending and the emphasis has moved to actual versus ideal. Reading self-congruence as a fresh construct rather than a renamed and re-focused self-congruity is the jangle trap this page is about.[3]
Escalas and Bettman's work, beginning with their 2003 article You Are What They Eat and developed in their 2005 Self-Construal, Reference Groups, and Brand Meaning, names self-brand connection: the degree to which a person has drawn a brand into their own self-concept and uses it to build or signal who they are. It is framed less as a static image match and more as an identity story, in which brands linked to admired reference groups become part of the self. Yet the core is again the overlap between a consumer's self and a brand's meaning, measured by items such as whether a brand reflects who the person is. Self-brand connection, self-congruity, self-image congruence, and self-congruence therefore circle the same ground under four labels, which is why a finding reported under one name may already exist under another.[4][5]
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