Book Description

Abstract: Despite the attention brand equity has received over the past 15 years, no consistent measure of brand equity has been adopted. In Chapter 2, I propose a new framework for conceptualizing brand equity that distinguishes between brand equity and brand value. In Chapter 3, I develop a measure of brand equity that is consistent with the framework introduced in Chapter 2, but is based on an empirical procedure that is applied to binary consumer response data collected by the Procter & Gamble Company for brands from four product categories and five countries. The benefit to marketing management is the implication that by using the approach described in this paper, other companies also can better understand where their consumers' brand beliefs come from, and now can develop a measure of brand equity that does not require a large complex instrument. In Chapter 4, I seek to understand the strategic implications of the mental sources of information consumers draw from to develop their beliefs about the benefits that brands deliver, as described in Chapter 3. The general hypothesis is that the level of information that consumers currently use to develop their brand beliefs will moderate the impact of new information, such that a strategic advantage exists for brands when consumers currently use one of the sources instead of the other. Chapter 4 describes an experiment to test whether consumers' current use of the high-level brand source or detailed attribute source is associated with less vulnerability to new (negative) information. This study finds that when subjects receive negative brand-level information second, it has a greater negative impact on overall brand evaluation if the initial information they possess about the brand is also at a brand level. On the contrary, when consumers are faced with negative brand-level information that directly contradicts existing brand-level information stored in memory, it is reasonable that this new information would be assimilated with the old, and the overall evaluation fall. The results do not support a general prophylactic effect of the brand source, but are consistent with existing brand theory and provide a strong foundation for future research.