The marketing advantages of strong brands
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STEVE HOEFFLER is an assistant professor at the Kenan-Flagler School of Business, University of North Carolina. His areas of expertise include: branding, consumer behaviour, decision making, and preference development. He was formerly the marketing representative for NCR/AT&T and consultant to Procter & Gamble, IBM, and Fujitsu. Professor Hoeffler received his PhD from Duke University (2000), his MBA from the University of California Davis (1994) and his BSc from San Diego State University (1985).
KEVIN LANE KELLER is the E.B. Osborn Professor of Marketing at the Amos Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, Hanover, USA. His academic resume´ includes degrees from Cornell, Duke, and Carnegie-Mellon universities with award-winning research and prior faculty positions at Berkeley, Stanford, and UNC. His textbook, Strategic Brand Management, has been adopted at top business schools and leading firms around the world and has been heralded as the ‘bible of branding’.
Abstract Building strong brands has become a marketing priority for many organisations. The presumption is that building a strong brand yields a number of marketing advantages. In this paper, a comprehensive summary of empirical findings is provided from some of the major marketing journals that reveal how brand strength, operationalised in various ways, can create differential responses by consumers to various marketing activities — a well-accepted view of brand equity. Additionally, some underlying theoretical mechanisms on which these findings are based are identified and organised. Lastly, some current gaps in the literature are identified, and an agenda put forth for future research on the marketing advantages of strong brands.
INTRODUCTION
Steve Hoeffler Kenan-Flagler School of Business, University of North Carolina, Campus Box 3490, McColl Building, Chapel Hill, NC 27599 3490, USA Tel: ⫹1 919 962 4926 Fax: ⫹1 919 962 7186 E-mail: [email protected]
Brand equity has been defined in a number of different ways for many different purposes.1–3 No matter how it is used or measured, however, the value of a brand — and thus its equity — must ultimately be derived in the marketplace from the words and actions of consumers. That is, consumers decide with their purchases, based on whatever factors they deem important, which brands have more equity than other brands. Thus, although the details of the approaches to brand equity may sometimes differ, they tend to share a common core: all definitions either implicitly or explicitly rely on brand knowledge structures in the
minds of consumers — individuals or organisations — as the source or foundation of brand equity. For example, one view of brand equity is ‘the differential effect that brand knowledge has on consumer response to marketing activity’.4,5 According to this view, a brand is thought to have positive equity to the extent that consumers respond more favourably to marketing activities when the brand is identified, compared to when it is not. Differential response may be reflected in differences
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