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ABSTRACT
Brand equity is a concept born in 1980s. It has aroused intense interest among business strategists from a wide variety of industries as brand equity is closely related with brand loyalty and brand extensions. Besides, successful brands provide competitive advantages that are critical to the success of companies. However, there is no common viewpoint emerged on the content and measurement of brand equity. Brand equity has been examined from financial and customer-based perspectives. This paper will only study the customer-based brand equity which refers to the consumer response to a brand name. The aims of the study are to review the dimensions of customer-based brand equity by drawing together strands from various literature and empirical studies made within the area of customer-based brand equity. A conceptual framework for measuring customer-based brand equity is developed to provide a more integrative conceptualization of brand equity
Keywords: brand equity, brand awareness, brand associations, brand loyalty, perceived quality
Introduction
The study of brand equity is increasingly popular as some researchers have concluded that brands are one of the most valuable assets that a company has. High brand equity levels are known to lead to higher consumer preferences and purchase intentions (Cobb-Walgren et al. 1995) as well as higher stock returns (Aaker and Jacobson, 1994). Besides, high brand equity brings an opportunity for successful extensions, resilience against competitors' promotional pressures, and creation of barriers to competitive entry (Farquhar 1989).
The concept of brand equity began to be used widely in the 1980s by advertising practitioners (Barwise 1993). Important academic contributors throughout the 1990s were Aaker (1991), Srivastava and Shocker (1991), Kapferer (1992), and Keller (1993, 1998). However, a universally accepted brand equity content and meaning (Vazquez et al 2002, Keller 2003) as well as measure has not been forthcoming (Washburn 2002). Almost all conceptualizations of brand equity agree today that the phenomena involve the value added to a product by consumers' associations and perceptions of a particular brand name (Winters 1991, Chaudhuri 1995).
Early research centered on measuring a brand's equity with the use of a variety of financial techniques (Farquhar et al. 1991, Simon & Sullivan 1990, Swait et al. 1993, Kapferer 1997). More recently, brand equity has increasingly been defined in customer-based contexts (Keller 1993)...