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Branding has emerged as a top management priority in the last decade due to the growing realization that brands are one of the most valuable intangible assets that firms have. Driven in part by this intense industry interest, academic researchers have explored a number of different brand-related topics in recent years, generating scores of papers, articles, research reports, and books. This paper identifies some of the influential work in the branding area, highlighting what has been learned from an academic perspective on important topics such as brand positioning, brand integration, brand-equity measurement, brand growth, and brand management. The paper also outlines some gaps that exist in the research of branding and brand equity and formulates a series of related research questions. Choice modeling implications of the branding concept and the challenges of incorporating main and interaction effects of branding as well as the impact of competition are discussed.
Key words: brands; brand equity; brand extensions
History: This paper was received August 19, 2004, and was with the authors 4 months for 2 revisions; processed by Leigh McAlister.
Introduction
Brands serve several valuable functions. At their most basic level, brands serve as markers for the offerings of a firm. For customers, brands can simplify choice, promise a particular quality level, reduce risk, and/or engender trust. Brands are built on the product itself, the accompanying marketing activity, and the use (or nonuse) by customers as well as others. Brands thus reflect the complete experience that customers have with products. Brands also play an important role in determining the effectiveness of marketing efforts such as advertising and channel placement. Finally, brands are an asset in the financial sense. Thus, brands manifest their impact at three primary levels-customer market, product market, and financial market. The value accrued by these various benefits is often called brand equity.
Our primary goal in this paper is to both selectively highlight relevant research on building, measuring, and managing brand equity and to identify gaps in our understanding of these topics. We put considerable emphasis on the latter and suggest numerous areas of future research.1 Five basic topics that align with the brand-management decisions and tasks frequently performed by marketing executives are discussed in detail: (1) developing brand positioning, (2) integrating brand marketing,...