Developing the measurement of Consumer based brand equity in service industry: An empirical study on mobile phone industry

Abstract

Building a strong brand is considered the best way of doing business because of the constant changes in the marketing environment (Aaker, 1996; King 1991; Lennon, 1993). Successful brand building could strengthen a producer’s competitive position to withstand the increasing power of retailers (Park and Srinivasan, 1994). The high costs associated with the launching of new brands and the high failure rates of new products (Crawford 1993, Ourusoff 1992) as well as increasing costs of advertising and distribution (Aaker 1991) are some of the reasons for the growing interest in brand management.  Since its appearance in the 1980s, brand equity has been one of the main priorities in marketing research (Marketing Science Institute, 2002). The concept of Brand equity is regarded as an important business practice as well as in academic research because marketers can gain competitive advantages through strong brands (Aaker, 1998; Keller, 1993, 2000). Brand equity research has largely concentrated on customer-based as opposed to firm-based (financial perspective) (Christodoulides and Chernatony 2004). This is because unlike the firm based approach which centres around financial valuation issues and provides little usable information for brand managers, the customer-based approach offers insights into customer behaviour convertible into actionable brand strategies ( Keller, 1993). Lassar et al., (1995) further argues in favour of consumer based brand equity approach by citing two reasons. First, customer-based brand equity is the driving force for incremental financial gains to the firm. Second, managers do not have a customer-based measure to evaluate brand equity