9.9
Customer-Based Brand Equity
Brand equity defined as the difference in how a customer responds to marketing for a branded product versus the identical product unbranded, located in brand knowledge held in memory.
Kevin Lane Keller, Journal of Marketing (1993); later extended into the brand resonance pyramid
What it does
Puts brand value inside the customer's head rather than on the balance sheet, and splits it into two things you can ask about — awareness, and the associations attached to it, scored on strength, favourability and uniqueness. That split is what makes a brand tracker constructible at all.
When it breaks
It never specifies the weights. Nothing in the framework says how much awareness is worth against how much favourability, so every tracker built on it makes those trade-offs implicitly and reports the result as a score. Defined as a differential response, it is also close to unfalsifiable in practice: any gap between a brand and an unbranded equivalent counts as evidence for it, and the framework names no case in which the differential should be zero.
Case
Ailawadi, Lehmann and Neslin proposed the revenue premium a brand earns over a private-label equivalent as an objective product-market measure of equity, computed it across packaged-goods categories and tested its validity. It proved reliable, reflected real changes in brand health over time and correlated with survey-based equity measures — which is what an operable version of Keller's construct looks like, and it took a separate paper a decade later to produce one.
Ailawadi, Lehmann & Neslin — Revenue Premium as an Outcome Measure of Brand Equity, Journal of Marketing (2003) ↗Diagram not yet drawn
The same product priced twice, branded and unbranded, with the gap between the two drawn as the whole of the construct; above it, the pyramid of associations with no weights on any edge.
In the wild
Unchecked · not part of the tier
What people have written about this tool in the last twelve months. A machine found these and nobody has read them. Everything above this line was checked by hand.
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