MY BRANDS AND I

My Brands and I



My Brands and I

Introduction

What consumers know about a brand will influence their reaction when confronted with brand-related stimuli (e.g. a branded product, a brand user, a category). Managing brand knowledge hence becomes a crucial task for brand managers (Aaker, 1996; Kapferer, 2004; Keller, 2003). Although brand knowledge is an important topic in the branding literature, there is little evidence how brand knowledge and consumer response are related (Del Rio et al., 2001). This paper aims to contribute to fill this gap by investigating how different levels of brand response intensity relate to consumer brand knowledge.

To study the link between brand knowledge and brand response we apply Keller's (1993) framework of customer-based brand equity who conceptualizes brand equity as the impact of brand knowledge - consumers' cognitive representations of a brand (Peter and Olson, 2001) - on reactions towards the brand (i.e. brand response). Brand equity is customer-based: equity is present when the customer is familiar with the brand and holds some favourable, strong, and unique brand associations in memory (Kamakura and Russell, 1991). This conceptualization implies that brand equity is a multifaceted construct consisting of both brand knowledge characteristics (i.e. content and properties of brand knowledge) and customer brand response defined in terms of attitudes and behaviours. While brand knowledge characteristics refer to brand perception, customer response “refers to the customer's processing of those perceptions to form subsequent comparative evaluations, preferences, behavioural intentions, or behaviour” (Hartman and Spiro, 2005, p. 1116)

Research on brand strength typically attempts to explain differences between brands. Strong brands are sometimes identified by behavioural measures like market share or behavioural loyalty (Tellis, 1988), by attitudinal measures like trust or satisfaction (Oliver, 1999), or by cognitive measures like the uniqueness of brand associations (Keller, 1993). These approaches are useful for defining the success of brands and sometimes uncover the relationship with some other; externally valid criteria like share price (Fornell et al., 2006). In contrast, we aim to understand consumer brand equity for one brand, that is, study brand strength within a brand. Hence we follow Krishnan's (1996) advice who suggested that equity for a single brand might vary between segments and studying this variation would add to the understanding of a brand's strength.

For this purpose we first discuss the link between consumer brand response and brand knowledge and why differences in brand knowledge by more or less intensively responsive consumer groups might exist. The study forwards hypotheses on how consumer brand response intensity relates to content and structure of brand knowledge. The authors test hypotheses in the context of two studies - one in a business-to-customer (B2C) setting, the other one in a business-to-business (B2B) setting. The former study looks at associations elicited by the brand, the latter at brands elicited by relevant consumer benefits. The article concludes with a discussion of the results and implications for brand management and future research.

Brand strength: the brand knowledge-response link

Consumer brand knowledge has been conceptualized in various ...