What is Customer-Based Brand Equity (And Why Should You Care)?
Market researchers are sometimes overly fond of charts, models, and graphs–but for good reason. Charts break down some of the complexities of marketing data so they’re easier to explain to and apply to businesses.
Take customer-based brand equity, for example: It’s a mouthful, but it actually depicts just how powerful a customer’s attitude toward a brand can be to that brand’s success. Usually designed as a pyramid, customer-based brand equity shows businesses how to lay the foundation that creates a positive attitude toward a brand, and how to capitalize on attitudes and loyalties of their customers.
Breaking down customer-based brand equity means understanding your customers’ wants and needs, even before they vocalize or demonstrate them with their dollars. Here are the basics.
Keller’s Model
The most common model for customer-based brand equity is the one created by
marketing professor Kevin Lane Keller in his book, Strategic Brand Management.Keller puts the model in a four-level pyramid, with the middle two layers being divided equally between two factors.
Level One: Salience
Salience could be more accurately described using the question, “Who are we?” It looks at the brand from the customer point of view and wonders what words buyers associate when they hear a specific brand name. In short, it quantifies both the depth and the breadth of customer awareness of a brand.
Breaking the second level into two categories allows a business to better consider brand reputation. Performance encompasses factors such as customer service and satisfaction with a product. It also calls product functionality into question, with reliability, durability, and price as factors for customer opinion.
Imagery is slightly different (but no less important) in creating meaning behind a brand. Imagery revolves around how customers’ needs are met both socially and
psychologically. While this can occur with customer interactions with the product, imagery can also be the work of targeted marketing and word-of-mouth.
Level Three: Judgement and Feelings
The third level of Keller’s model–judgement and feelings–are so closely related that it’s difficult to separate the two. In fact, the third level might be more accurately broken into four categories:
Either actual or perceived.
Created through a customer’s measure of trust for a brand and its products. A judgement based on the relevancy of a product to each individual’s
circumstances.
Customers deciding where one brand falls in comparison to another.
Judgement and feelings take into account personal opinions to decipher how customers think and feel about a brand–whether it’s based on actual interaction or perceived reputation.
Level Four: Resonance
and previous experience with the brand. A good measure for this can be used with the Net Promoter Score system.
Building customer-based brand equity doesn’t happen overnight, which is why Keller’s model is so succinct. By starting at the bottom and letting customers get to know your business little by little, you create a trustworthy, likeable, and ultimately successful brand.
Brand Resonance
Definition: The Brand Resonance refers to the relationship that a consumer has with the product and how well he can relate to it.
The brand resonance begins with:
Brand Identification: The first and foremost step, is to ensure the brand identification with the customers, i.e. creates awareness about the product and establish an association in the minds of customers with respect to its usage and the segment for which it exists.
Brand Establishment: To create a full meaning of the product in the minds of customers, so that they start remembering it.
Eliciting Response: Once the association is built with the customers, the next step is to elicit the responses, i.e. what customers feel about the brand?
Relationship: The next and final step is to convert the responses into building the customer’s strong relationship with the brand.
In order to accomplish these four pre-requisites for creating the brand equity, the Six brand building blocks need to be followed that are arranged in a pyramid-like structure called asBrand Resonance Pyramid.
Brand Resonance Pyramid
1.
Brand Salience: The brand salience means, how well the customer is informed about the product and how often it is evoked under the purchase situations?
The marketer should not only focus on just creating the awareness about the product but also includes the ease with which the customers can remember the brand and the ability to recall it under the different purchase situations.
2. Brand Performance: The Brand performance means, how well the functional needs of customers are met?
At this level of the pyramid, the marketers check the way in which product is performing and how efficiently it is fulfilling the needs of the customers.
3. Brand Imagery: The Brand Imagery means, what product image the customer create in their minds?
This aspect deals with the customer’s psychology or the feelings that how they relate to the product in terms of their social needs.
4. Brand Judgements: The Brand Judgement means, What customer decides with respect to the product?
The customers make the judgement about the product by consolidating his several performances and the imagery associations with the brand. On the basis of these, the final judgement is made about the product in terms of its Perceived Quality, Credibility, Consideration and Superiority.
The consumer can develop emotions towards the brand in terms of fun, security, self-respect, social approval, etc.
6. Brand Resonance: The Brand Resonance means, what psychological bond, the customer has created with the brand?
This is the ultimate level of the pyramid, where every company tries to reach. Here the focus is on building the strong relationship with the customer thereby ensuring the repeated purchases and creating the brand loyalty.
The resonance is the intensity of customer’s psychological connection with the brand and the randomness to recall the brand in different consumption situations.
