During the past 20 years, brand equity has been a priority topic for both practitioners and academics. Thus since 1980s, brand have been regarded as the most important asset that a company has. In order to effectively manage the brand equity, it is ne...
During the past 20 years, brand equity has been a priority topic for both practitioners and academics. Thus since 1980s, brand have been regarded as the most important asset that a company has. In order to effectively manage the brand equity, it is necessary to define the brand equity and its components.
In general sense, brand equity is defined as the marketing effects or outcomes that accrue to a product with its brand name compared with those that would accrue if the same product did not have the brand name. The competitive benefits of the brand that have a strong brand equity include the opportunity for successful extension, the protection against competitors' promotional pressures, and creation of barriers to competitive entry. Despite tremendous interest in brand equity, there is no sufficient study about differences in building process of brand equity among different brand categories.
In this perspective, the first purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between brand equity and its components through the comprehensive model and to compare the various measurement tools for brand equity. Several studies suggested that there are only a few marketing efforts in their research and future research should examine to more marketing actions to enhance the explanatory power of the brand equity phenomenon. We also think it is very important to find out the important variables influence the brand equity and investigate the relationship among those variables.
Secondly, this study is to investigate the differences of build process of brand equity among various brand categories. Even if there were a lot of practical and theoretical researches about 'how company can enhance brand equity, and several researches about different aspects of brand equity in a special product category, but there were few study comparing the process of building brand equity among different product categories.
In order to achieve these purposes, the comprehensive model proposed of this study is based on the previous studies on the relationships among the components of brand equity. Also, we selected products representing each cell of FCB Grid model, Taylor's product wheel model, and purchase motivation scale based on the self-determination theory(SDT). A research model and hypotheses for empirical analysis are established.
Data were collected from 477 respondents(242 males and 235 females), who live in Busan․Gyeong-Nam, Seoul․Gyeong-gi provinces, aged between 17 and 55. 26 hypotheses based on the nine latent variables are proposed and tested through the structural equation modeling.
The major findings from empirical analysis and their implications were as follows. Brand awareness is found to be positively related with perceived quality, brand image. Self-congruency has a positive effect on perceived quality, brand image, brand experience, brand identification. Perceived quality is positively related with brand image. Brand image has a positive effect on brand experience, brand attachment, brand trust, brand equity. Brand experience affects brand identification, brand attachment, brand equity. Brand identification has a positive effect on brand attachment, brand trust, brand equity. Brand trust is positively related with brand attachment, brand equity. Finally brand attachment affects brand equity.
The results indicate that five components.(i.e., self-congruency, brand image, brand experience, brand identification, brand trust, brand attachment) have a significant influence on enhancing brand equity. At the same time, the results show that the importance of each dimension varies across the product type.
In the final section, along with the summary of the results, both the academic contribution and the managerial implications of this analysis are discussed. A few limitations of this paper are mentioned and the future research directions are set out to overcome the limitations.