Brand equity: Snark or boojum?

Abstract

The concept of brand equity is barely ten years old and has only recently become the subject of much academic research. This has largely focused on the short-term responses of US consumers to hypothetical brand extensions, with many findings of great potential interest to practitioners. These results need to be replicated, quantified, and developed, and the research needs to expand into other aspects of brand equity: defining and measuring it; building and managing it, especially over the long term; analysing the links between customer-based "brand strength" and financial "brand equity"; and leveraging brand equity geographically as well as through brand extensions. The paper argues that progress may have been hindered by attempts to find a single all-embracing measure of brand equity, partly because the value of a brand is not in practice separable from the value of the product and the rest of the firm. Its overall conclusion is that researchers should now focus more effort on the strategic, financial, managerial, and international aspects of brand equity.