BRAND VALUE

Brand Value

Brand Value

Introduction

Brand value is defined by the Business Owner's Toolkit (www.toolkit.com/news/newsDetail.aspx?aa=1&nid=04-229askalice) as “the relationship of its quality to its price”. The old Marketing 101 definition of brand value is also the relationship of its quality to its price. A cursory glance through Google™, a well known internet search engine, reveals approximately 409,000 entries for the phrase “brand value”. This number, by itself, shows the importance of the concept. The academic literature on brand value, searchable by Google Scholar®, reveals 4,880 references. The Google entries show both academic treatments of brand value as well as business entries from service providers.

Brand value is, however, a concept that is not really well defined (Zeithaml, 1988). In general, it relates to the influence of a brand in the marketing mix or the impact of the brand name on reactions to other features of the marketing mix, such as the reactions to the actual product. What is quite interesting, however, is the inordinate amount of attention paid to this concept. From a commercial end, companies such as “InterBrand” put dollar values on the concept of a company's brand value (Farquhar et al., 1992). Indeed, brand value may enter into the sales and purchase price of a company, for brand value can endure when the actual physical products change, evolve, mature and die. Branding is, therefore, a major issue in a product strategy.

Building a good relationship between company and customer has proven to be a successful marketing strategy. Mitchell (1997) described good relationship marketing as the act of gathering customers very tightly around a brand, and building customer loyalty by focusing on the desires of customers. Brands exist among the consumers' cognitive structure as images through labeling, advertising and packaging. Branding creates product differentiation in order to meet a customer's needs and desires.

According to an international survey conducted by Kurt Salmon Associates, approximately 62 percent of US consumers and 67 percent of UK consumers would go to another store if the brand they were looking for was not available at the first place they shopped (Reda, 1996). It is a fact that we are in an over-branded world. Brands have become so important to consumers and retailers that, during a nine-year period from the mid 1980s and well into the 1990s, over 1,000 research studies related to brands and branding were conducted from around the world (Light, 1997). However, few brands survive for very long, many brands disappear, and many new brands are introduced regularly. To be a dominant company (in other words, a long-term successful company), it is an enormous task to build brand loyalty, to reach brand loyal customers, and to give those customers product satisfaction.

In today's globally linked marketing environment, the challenge to marketers is to understand global customers' behaviours. The Republic of Korea (Korea) is one of the fashion markets in Asia that represents an important global player. Harp et al. (2000), like others (Jin and Koh, 1999; Kim and Han, 2000) have recently studied the South Korean clothing market and ...