Perceived Congruence and Incongruence: Toward a Clarification of the Concept,its Formation and Measure

Abstract

For thirty years, marketing research has regularly integrated the idea of perceived “congruency” in its models. A disparate literature, difficult to organize in a coherent whole, follows from this large number of studies and from the wide variety of fields in which they were carried out: How to define congruency, how does it form itself, and how to measure it? This article aims at gathering, organizing and discussing the answers that can be found in more than a hundred articles.