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Introduction
Brand equity Brand equity is defined as a set of assets (and liabilities) linked to a brand's
name and symbol that adds to (or subtracts from) the value provided by a
product or service to a firm and/or that firm's customers (Aaker, 1991). The
major assets can be grouped into five categories: brand loyalty, name
awareness, perceived quality, brand association, and other proprietary brand
assets such as patents, trademarks, and channel relationships (Aaker, 1991).
From a customer-based perspective, Keller (1993) defined brand equity as
the differential effects that brand knowledge has on consumer response to the
marketing of that brand. Brand knowledge is, in terms of an associative
network model, a network of nodes and links where the brand node memory
has a variety of associations or simple unique association linked to it.
Compared to three other assets of Aaker's ± brand awareness, brand loyalty,
and perceived quality, we think that brand association is the core asset for
building strong brand equity. Several reasons can be addressed. First, brand
awareness is a necessary asset but not sufficient for building strong brand
equity. For example, a brand could be well known because it has bad quality.
However, a strong brand must have higher awareness than a weak brand.
JOURNAL OF PRODUCT & BRAND MANAGEMENT, VOL. 10 NO. 7 2001, pp. 439-451, # MCB UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1061-0421 439
Second, the other brand equity dimensions enhance brand loyalty. The
perceived quality, the associations, and the well-known name can provide
reasons to buy and affect user satisfaction, which result to brand loyalty.
However, brand loyalty is sometimes excluded from the conceptualization of
brand equity, because consumers may be in the habit of buying a particular
brand without really thinking much about why (Keller, 1998). Finally, the
perceived quality is one kind of brand association. The concept of brand
knowledge also focuses on the association network. We can see that brand
equity is supported in great part by the associations that consumers make
with a brand. Therefore, a deeper understanding of brand association
becomes more critical when building strong brands.
Memory network model Krishnan (1996) used a memory network model to identify various
association characteristics underlying consumer-based brand equity. An
empirical study measures association characteristics and examines
differences between high and low equity brands. The results show that high
equity brands, compared to brands with low equity, have a greater number of
associations and more net positive associations. However, what are the real
attributes of brand association? Are all associations relevant to the brand
equity? Aaker (1996) has expanded brand association, usually recognized as
product-related, to include organizational associations. Although
organizational associations, such as corporate image, have a long history in
the marketing literature, there is a surprising lack of evidence on how, when,
and what types of organizational associations affect product responses. Thus,
it is also important to understand how the information consumers associate
with a company affects their responses to the products and services offered
by that company. Therefore, the purposes of this study are to identify the
types of brand association and examine the relationship between association
characteristics and brand equity.
Research design
Free association procedure Associations are measured in industry and consumer research in a number of
ways. Aaker (1991) categorizes these measurements as direct methods that
scale various brand perceptions and indirect methods, which infer meanings
on consumer response. Since this study is focusing on understanding brand
associations from the consumer's perspective, the indirect approach was
used. In order to identify the typology of brand association derived from this
study, and examine the relationship between association characteristics and
brand equity, a free association procedure was used. Three brands, which
would be familiar and relevant to both males and females in the student
sample, were chosen as high equity brands for this study. Besides the
familiarity and relevance to the subjects, the other important criterion for
choosing the object was its branding strategy should use corporate branding.
Therefore, we selected three product categories including PC, printer, and
athletic shoes. The three brands were Acer, HP, and Nike. An additional
three brands, in contrast to the above three brands in the same product
category, were chosen as low equity brands. These brands were Twinhead,
Epson, and Jump. In printer product category, the Taiwan market is almost
occupied by three brands ± HP, Epson, and Canon. It is difficult to find a
well-known brand with low equity and also meet the criteria of using
corporate branding strategy. Therefore, a comparable Epson brand was
chosen as a kind of control group. Premium price was used to measure brand
equity by adopting an experimental design. Subjects were asked to describe
Results analysis
We first explored the brand equity comparisons for each product category
between high and low equity brands. Then we examined the contents of
brand association for those high equity brands based on free association.
Finally, the difference between the high equity brands and low equity brands
on the association measures were examined.
High and low equity brands In order to compare the difference of brand equity between high and low
equity brands, T-test comparisons were used to test for statistical differences.
Perceived price premium between the brand product and an unbranded
product was used to measure brand equity. The result indicates that the brand
equity of Acer is significantly higher than that of Twinhead (US$324 vs
US$160, t = 5.464 p < 0.001). The brand equity of Nike is also significantly
higher than of Jump (US$39 vs US$15, t = 7.208, p < 0.001). However, there
is no significant difference between HP and Epson (US$110 vs US$96,
t = 1.643, p > 0.05). Because of the difficulty of choosing a well-known
brand with lower brand equity to compare with HP, as we mentioned above,
the non-significant differences in brand equity between HP and Epson were
predictable.
Regarding the free association contents, the responses were categorized into
five types of associations: functional attribute, non-functional attribute,
corporate ability, corporate social responsibility, and neutral association. The
number of each kind of association for each subject was then coded. Table II
shows the frequency and percentage of associations for each high equity
brand.
Corporate social It was very surprising that the corporate social responsibility association was
responsibility nearly absent across the three brands. Only four subjects out of a total of 200
samples mentioned this kind of association. In fact, those companies spend
great sums of money each year on corporate advertising, corporate
philanthropy, sponsorships, and cause-related marketing. For example, HP
spent more than one million dollars per year in Taiwan to sponsor a lot of
computer equipments for school, following its worldwide image-building
program of business citizenship. This indicates that the outcomes of social
responsibility action results are difficult to ascertain. In terms of total
association frequency, we can see that most of the HP brand associations
were focused on functional attributes (60), followed by non-functional
attributes (37) and corporate ability (31). The Nike brand associations
resulted mostly from product associations, particularly non-functional (138)
and functional attributes (68). The number of corporate ability associations
was relatively low (14). However, the Acer brand associations were more
organizational association oriented, primarily corporate ability association
(64), followed by non-functional (49) and functional attributes (34). In sum,
we can conclude that the core associations of Acer, HP and Nike are
t-test comparisons between brands within each product category were used to
test for statistical differences. The results are shown in Table IV.
Brand related and neutral Based on free association, we categorized the total associations into
associations brand-related and neutral associations. Because corporate social
responsibility was nearly absent, we only used the other three brand-related
associations ± functional attribute, non-functional attribute, and corporate
ability associations to perform the comparisons. In terms of total
associations, the average numbers of associations for higher equity brands ±
Acer and Nike ± were significantly higher than the contrast brands ±
Twinhead and Jump, respectively 5.79 vs 3.67 p < 0.001 and 6.31 vs 4.24
p < 0.001. The same situation occurred in the brand association for both Acer
and Nike: 2.21 vs 0.41 for Acer and Twinhead, p < 0.01; 3.04 vs 0.95 for
Nike and Jump, p < 0.001. However, in terms of neutral association, there
was no significant difference between the high and low equity brands. Based
on these results, we can conclude that brand-related associations, instead of
total associations, are the key driving factors in building strong brands.
Therefore, H2 was supported.
Comparisons of the specific brand-related association content are examined
next. In Nike vs Jump, the average number of non-functional attribute
associations for Nike was significantly higher than that of Jump (1.93 vs
Non-
Functional functional Corporate Brand Neutral Total
Brand attribute attribute ability association association association
Acer (n = 68) 0.50 (0.94) 0.72 (1.16) 0.94 (1.08) 2.21 (2.17) 3.35 (2.44) 5.79 (3.08)
Twinhead (n = 51) 0.14 (0.40) 0.20 (0.53) 0.01 (0.27) 0.41 (0.90) 3.25 (2.15) 3.67 (2.09)
t-value 2.859** 3.305** 6.341** 6.514** 0.232 4.481***
HP (n = 58) 1.03 (1.34) 0.64 (0.93) 0.57 (1.26) 2.24 (2.48) 2.72 (2.28) 4.97 (2.55)
Epson (n = 37) 0.70 (1.15) 0.54 (0.65) 0.27 (0.51) 1.51 (1.74) 3.00 (2.08) 4.51 (1.80)
t-value 1.285 0.600 1.613 1.678 ± 0.607 1.009
Nike (n = 74) 0.92 (1.31) 1.93 (1.99) 0.19 (0.51) 3.04 (2.92) 3.27 (2.42) 6.31 (2.64)
Jump (n = 38) 0.57 (0.99) 0.35 (0.68) 0.003 (0.160) 0.95 (1.35) 3.30 (2.32) 4.24 (2.03)
t-value 1.578 6.165*** 2.469*** 5.166*** ± 0.057 4.588**
Notes: The numbers represent the mean number of brand associations. Standard deviations are in
parentheses. *p < 0.05 **p < 0.01 ***p < 0.001
Table IV. Comparisons of the average number of brand associations and brand
equity
References
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