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Woon Bong Na: Assistant Professor, Department of Advertising, School of Business, Pusan University, Pusan, South Korea
Roger Marshall: Associate Professor, Nanyang Business School, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Kevin Lane Keller: E.B. Osborn Professor of Marketing, Amos Tuck School of Business Administration, Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, USA
Assembling and validating the macro-model
There is a great deal of published research about brand equity; most of it deals either with attempting to value brand equity or with trying to understand more about the structure and composition of the construct for marketing purposes. In this paper a macro-model is first assembled by combining and adapting several existing partial models, then the model is validated by collecting and analyzing appropriate market data. The objective is to reach an understanding of how best to optimize brand equity through the most parsimonious use of marketing tools. Thus several suggestions made in the literature are met: to improve our conceptualization of the brand equity construct (Monroe and Krishnan, 1985; Shocker et al., 1994; Zeithaml, 1988); to establish the operationalisable indicators of brand equity from the consumer perspective (Biel, 1993; Keller, 1993); to conduct empirical research in order to develop valid benchmarks for the direct approach to measuring customer-based equity (Keller, 1993; Park and Srinivasan, 1994); and to conduct validation work to justify brand equity measurements and methodology (Urban and Hauser, 1980).
In the work that follows, the "brand power" model is first briefly illustrated and justified, then the empirical research undertaken is described in detail.
The brand power model
Brand equity construct
The very extensive literature attempting to conceptualize the brand equity construct is summarized in several recent publications. Keller (1993) wrote of two stages of equity-development, labeled "awareness level" and "image level", that stem from consumers' needs and wants and lead to a brand evaluation within a product/service category, which, coupled with purchase, is the manifestation of brand equity.
Awareness is fairly simply described and measured by recognition and recall, but image is a far more complex construct with which to deal. What has become clear in recent work on the topic, however, is that image cannot be assessed by attribute measurement alone, but must include measurement of consumers' perceptions of the value and benefits attainable by using the brand -...