JUSTIFICATION PAGE

TOPIC
MEASURING CUSTOMER BASED BRAND EQUITY Todays world is a world of brands. Like us, most of the people go for a branded product rather than a generic one. So it is very important to keep a focus on the branding. Brand equity is basically a unique position of a specific brand as compared to its competitors. Every brand equity has a financial perspective as well as a customers perspective. We choose to work on customer-based brand equity as it is the customer who sets the marginal profits for the brands. So it is very much important to know that how a customer perceives a brand for measuring a brand equity.

VARIABLES
The research work done on customer based brand equity which we adapted from Arrun Sharma and Banwari Mittal in 1995 mentioned only 5 variables for measuring customer based brand equity. According to them performance and quality are the same things but we dont agree with them. According to our view performance and quality are different. Performance is a how well a product can be used, its non defectiveness and trouble free nature. While quality is something like a product can be non-defected in the long run and in case it gets out of order how well the company will compensate the customer. We also added satisfaction and brand loyalty as variables for measuring customer based brand equity because brand loyalty has a direct relationship with brand equity and brand equity stems out of a greater confidence that a consumer places in a brand than they do in its competitors. Satisfaction is a sense of positive feelings and experience of the consumer so it must be included in our view to measure customer based brand equity.

QUESTIONNAIRE DEVELOPMENT AND SCALE USED

We have developed a simple questionnaire which is quite easy to understand and answer by the respondents. The questionnaire is designed by keeping in view the main variables and it also covers the operationlized variables. The scale which we used in questionnaire is SEMANTIC DIFFERENTIAL SCALE. We were advised to use a staple scale but we used this because of the reason that it consists of adjectives or phrases at the two poles of semantic meanings and respondent can easily express his/her perceptions in words about the specific brand.