Marketing Research Editing and Proofreading Services

Brand authenticity is measured with four items, alpha is .87, and the construct predicts purchase intention. Two of the four items ask about honesty, one asks about heritage and one asks about whether the brand is different from its competitors. The scale is reliable — the items move together — and it may not be measuring authenticity at all.

We edit what marketing academics write — consumer behaviour papers, scale development and validation studies, experimental work and its manipulation checks, survey-based research, brand and advertising studies, quantitative modelling papers, qualitative consumer research, and theses, articles and conference submissions. Our editors work on the construct and the distance between it and the measure.

Construct validity is where marketing research is strongest or weakest, and its failure is a reliable scale standing in for a concept it does not capture. Reliability says the items agree with each other; validity asks whether they measure the thing. We work through these so the construct is defined conceptually before any items are shown, since a definition written after the scale exists will always fit it; so the items are reproduced in full in the paper or appendix rather than described, because a reader cannot assess a construct from its name; so the scale's provenance is given with any adaptation and why it was made, given that a borrowed scale changed for a new context is a new scale and its properties are unknown; so discriminant validity is demonstrated against the constructs it is closest to rather than the ones it obviously differs from, as the useful test is whether authenticity separates from trust and quality; so common method variance is addressed where predictor and outcome come from the same questionnaire in the same sitting; so manipulation checks are reported as evidence that the treatment moved what it was meant to move and nothing else; and so the alternative interpretation of the measure is named. Papers written this way get built on rather than quietly ignored.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including unpublished studies, proprietary data and commercially sensitive material. We are editors rather than marketing academics, and we offer no view on constructs, scales or findings. What we can do is close the gap between the concept and the measure.