George Christodoulides
Senior Lecturer, University of Birmingham, UK.
Cleopatra Veloutsou
Head of Marketing Research Unit, ATINER & Senior Lecturer,
University of Glasgow, UK.European Study of Brand Equity
Brand equity is a key metric of brand success and one of the most
important intangible assets for organisations. Several stakeholders are
receipients of brand value including firm, distributors and employees,
however brand building activities are often targeted at consumers.
Consumer based brand equity encapsulates a set of perceptions,
attitudes, knowledge, and behaviours on the part of consumers that
results in increased utility to consumers and allows a brand to earn
greater volume or greater margins than it could without the brand
name (Christodoulides and de Chernatony 2010). Although consumer
based brand equity has been extensively researched, there is little
agreement on its constituent dimensions.
A review of the pertinent literature has also identified that most of
the research on the subject originates from the US. Furthermore, most of
the studies base the conceptualisation of brand equity on Aaker without
considering the role of context and the views of practitioners in the
selection of appropriate measures for brand equity.
In this study we investigate the concept in Europe taking into
account the views of marketing professionals and validate the findings
with data collected from representative samples from three European
countries, namely UK, Germany and Greece. The findings suggest four
categories of measures namely consumers’ understanding of brand
characteristics; consumers’ brand evaluation; consumers’ feelings about
the brand; and finally consumer’s behaviour towards the brand.