In the early years of brand management the focus was on the ‘sender end’ of brand
communication. In the year of 1993 brand management was profoundly changed
by one research article in particular. Kevin Lane Keller published the article
‘Conceptualizing, measuring, and managing customer-based brand equity’ in the
Journal of Marketingand thereby instigated a major change in the field of brand
management. Customer-based brand equity is based on the premise that the brand
resides in the minds of consumers as a cognitive construal, which is why we have
chosen to name it the consumer-based approach. Consumer research was, at this
point in time, very much influenced by cognitive psychology and the related infor-
mation-processing theory of consumer choice. Insights from these veins of liter-
ature were adapted to brand management theory by the birth of the
consumer-based approach.
The 1993 article introduced a new brand and consumer perspective, thus giving
birth to a new brand management approach. Besides that, it also played an
extremely important role as it discussed and clarified some central notions of brand
management. At this time, the discipline of brand management suffered from a lack
of independence in relation to the parent discipline of marketing. Research articles
on branding were often difficult to tell from articles on advertising research and
other marketing phenomena. The key notion of brand equity often was not even
mentioned and certainly not defined. All in all, the academic discipline of brand
management appeared rather immature and scientifically incomplete. All this
changed after the introduction of customer-based brand equity. One of the very
important contributions of the Keller publication was that the article instigated a
new way of relating to the more and more independent scientific discipline of brand
management by its thorough discussion of the key term of brand equity. Before
1993 academic articles rarely mentioned brand equity while the vast majority of
post-1993 articles start out by relating their subject of choice to different definitions
of brand equity (read about brand equity in chapter 2).
Since the launch of the consumer-based approach, the mindset behind it has been
widely adopted as the most influential way of thinking about brands and branding:
‘Keller’s exposition of the customer-based brand equity model offers the most
widely accepted and comprehensive treatment of branding in American marketing’
(Holt 2005, p. 277). The initial impact of the theory as presented in 1993 has been
followed up by the great importance of Keller’s book Strategic Brand
Management: Building, Measuring, and Managing Brand Equity(1998 and 2003).
As it is our aim to make a side-by-side presentation of the seven schools of
thought, they are presented as ideal types. Therefore, we focus on the original
cognitive brand and consumer perspective in this approach (by focusing on the
founding article and the literature relating to it). How the approach has further
developed will be discussed and compared with the new approaches in a final section.
Assumptions of the consumer-based approach
The two prior approaches – the economic approach and the identity approach – are
both primarily focused on the sending endof brand communication. The
84 Seven brand approaches