Three essays exploring consumers' relationships with brands and the implications for brand equity

During the past 15 years, brand equity has been a priority topic for both practitioners and academics. Despite the attention it has received during this period, no consistent measure of brand equity has been adopted. In Chapter 2, I propose a new framework for conceptualizing brand equity that distinguishes between brand equity, conceived of as an intrapersonal construct that moderates the impact of marketing activities, and brand value, which is the sale or replacement value of a brand. Such a distinction is important because, from a managerial perspective, the ultimate goal of brand equity research should be to understand how to leverage equity to create value.;In Chapter 3, I develop a measure of brand equity that is consistent with the framework introduced in the previous chapter, but is based on an empirical procedure that utilizes the loadings produced by an unconstrained factor analysis model that is applied to binary consumer response data collected by the Procter & Gamble Company (P&G) for brands from four product categories and five countries (17 total markets).;This chapter introduces an empirical procedure to identify which sources consumers use to develop their beliefs about brands, i.e., high-level brand or detailed attribute sources, and the implications for brand management. From these sources, I then develop a measure of brand equity based on consumers' use of the high-level brand source and show that a significantly smaller number of questions can produce a measure of brand equity that correlates highly with that produced by P&G's current system.;In Chapter 4, I seek to understand the strategic implications of the mental sources of information consumers draw from to develop their beliefs about the benefits that brands deliver, as described in Chapter 3. The general hypothesis is that the level of information that consumers currently use to develop their brand beliefs (high-level brand information or detailed attribute information) will moderate the impact of new information, such that a strategic advantage exists for brands when consumers currently use one of the sources instead of the other. The results from Chapter 3 demonstrated that the high-level brand source is more closely related to a measure of brand equity. The question remains whether the outcomes that are supposed to accrue to a brand with high equity (especially those of greater loyalty and less vulnerability) empirically can be linked with either the high-level or detailed attribute source. Chapter 4 describes an experiment to test whether consumers' current use of the high-level brand source or detailed attribute source is associated with less vulnerability to new (negative) information. What this study finds is that when subjects receive negative brand-level information second, it has a greater negative impact on overall brand evaluation if the initial information they possess about the brand is also at a brand level. Since the second brand-level information does not specifically contradict the initial attribute-level information, consumers would be left to determine the extent to which they will let the new non-performance related information impact their overall brand evaluations.;On the contrary, when consumers are faced with negative brand-level information that directly contradicts existing brand-level information stored in memory, it is reasonable that this new information would be assimilated with the old, and the overall evaluation fall. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).