Book Description

Brands are valuable intangible assets with long-term benefits. In the retail industry, branding is of particular importance because of the highly competitive nature of the industry. Even though many of the important branding principles apply, retail brands are distinct from product brands. This dissertation aims to clarify the nature and dimensionality of retail brand equity and explore the effect of retail advertising on its market and financial performance. In the first essay, the primary antecedents of retail brand equity are examined using both functional and experiential dimensions of retail brand association. The results illustrate the salient role of the consumer shopping experience in cultivating retail brand equity and suggest that retailers are worth more than just the products they sell. Additionally, the assessment of several sources of shopping value and the consumer shopping experience in a retail setting can provide a good diagnostic tool for marketing practitioners. The second essay proposes and validates the resource premium as an outcome measure of retail brand equity. We developed our measurement in a retail clothing setting and validated it for retail grocery to prove its generalizability. We further validated the measure by examining its correlation with other commonly available measures and assessed the predictive validity of the measure by examining its relationship with a firm’s brand performance (Tobin’s q). The results show that our measure reflects the main underlying construct of retail brand equity and can also tap into dimensions of retail brand equity that other measures do not reflect. Finally, as retail continues to spend the most on advertising across all industries, the third essay aims to explore the effect of retail advertising on different retail brand performance metrics. Using longitudinal data of 113 retailers from 2008–2015, this study is the first to empirically examine whether the timing of advertising can influence a retailer’s performance, and in what way. The findings underscore the importance of advertising concentration and reveal a more comprehensive picture of how retail advertising really works.