Brand
• A name, term, sign, symbol, or design, or a combination of them intended to identify the goods and services of one seller or group of sellers and to differentiate them from those of the competition
Brand Equity
• A set of assets (and liabilities) linked to a brand’s names and symbol that add to (or subtract from) the value provided by a product or service to a firm and/ or that firm’s customers.
• Brand equity is a combination of intermediate consumer responses and both customer and firm benefits.
Consumer Responses that Make up Brand Equity
Strength of Association
• Refers to the intensity with which target consumers link a particular word, phrase, or meaning to a particular brand.
• Strong associations tend to those that are “top of mind” for the customer.
• Measures of strength include the number of times an association was mentioned, rank order of the association and speed of recall.
• Strength of association is often divided among two criteria: relevance and consistency.
• Relevance: degree to which the brand is perceived as meeting the needs of the target customer.
• Consistency:degree to which each element of the brand reinforces the brand intent.
Valence
• Refers to the degree to which the association is positive or negative.
Uniqueness
• Captures the degree to which the association is distinct relative to other brands.
• Uniqueness can be further subdivided into distinctiveness and memorability.
• Distinctiveness is the degree to which the brand is differentiated from competitors.
• Memorability is the brand’s ability to provide a lasting communication effect.
Ways to Measure Brand Equity
Depth Interviews
• Needed to dig deeply into respondents’ memories.
Portfolio of techniques
• No single technique is adequate.
• Complementary techniques interact with each other to stimulate respondents’ abilities to access and verbalize memories and overcome their unwillingness to share them with the researcher.
Validate research findings
• Can be achieved using multiple techniques including structured and unstructured projective methods, in-depth interviews and surveys.
• Finding the same associations with more than one method adds confidence to the results.
Techniques for measuring brand associations:
• Thought listing
• Visual techniques
• Projective technique
• Sentence completion
• Depth interviews
• Rating scales