What is meant by brand equity?
The brand equity may be understood as the highest value paid for the brand names during buyouts and mergers. This concept may be defined as the incremental value of a business above the value of its physical assets due to the market positioning achieved by its brand and the extension potential of the brand. In the market a strong brand will be considered to have high brand equity.
The brand equity will be higher if the brand loyalty, awareness, perceived quality, strong channel relationships and association of trademarks and patents are higher. High brand equity provides many competitive advantages to the company. The company may have low price and high consumer loyalty and also more trade leverage. It would be difficult to measure the brand equity of various brands in the market as the parameter are very subjective and the whole exercise may turn out to be arbitrary.
The integration of all these variables make the brand equity high of the company. The brand equity further leads to brand personality of the company. The company may decide the brand personality strategy after analyzing the strength and weakness of the existing brands in the market. The research on assessing the brand personality may be conducted by using the brand rating method to get quantitative measures.
The methods of photo sorting (trademark) phrase writing and simulation games may be used for assessing the brand personality. The sample consumers for this purpose should be self-directed, principled, externally directed, status oriented action-oriented consumers and non-driven consumers.
The effective strategy for implementing the brand personality measures would to go for aggressive advertising using the consumer reviews and comparative product advantages. However, the consistency in the message should be taken care of properly.
