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Introduction
Research interest in brand equity and branding has been an important topic of research in the marketing area. The "brand equity construct" refers to the added value a brand name gives to a product or service ([1] Aaker, 1991). Brand equity empowers companies to negotiate lower costs of distribution, increased effectiveness in marketing communication, and expanded growth opportunities from brand extensions and licences ([100] Yoo and Donthu, 2001).
Notwithstanding its importance, this concept has rarely been applied to assess online companies. Perhaps, this reflects the belief that the key principles of how to develop the brand remain the same on the Internet ([79] Rubinstein and Griffith, 2001, p. 332). Alternatively, it might be that the Internet makes brands irrelevant as consumers have cost-free access to a large amount of information about product characteristics, including prices, which tends to convert products into commodities ([26] Chen, 2001; [35] Dussart, 2001). Early studies by economists have concluded that, despite the potential of the Internet to make markets perfect, customer are still willing to pay a premium price of 6.8 per cent for commodity products like books and CDs when bought from Amazon.com rather than CDNow ([55] Lynch and Ariely, 2000). While many studies to date have identified and ratified the importance of brand equity dimensions among traditional firms, few have tested the model with online companies.
The contention in this paper is that traditional consumer-based brand equity measures and concepts for online companies differ in degree, not kind, from a packaged-goods brand equity point of view. One difference is that online businesses are mainly services, and in these "the source of the experience is the locus of brand formation" ([17] Berry, 2007, p.130). Second, in a computer-mediated environment the company's web site is the experience ([34] Dayal et al. , 2000; [89] Taylor, 2003). This is different from the experience consumers have in an offline business environment where they can interact with people rather than technology. Third, it is argued that brand equity has some specific and differentiated antecedents for online retail brands - for example, related to the web site design (security assurance, accessibility, navigationally) - and wider product assortment among other features ([65] Page and Lepkowska-White, 2002). Fourth, given that online businesses are mainly...