Brand Equity: The Marketer’s View on Brand Value

At the time financial markets started recognizing the value of intangible assets and brands marketing academics in the US, in the early-1990s, also attempted to conceptualize the brand as a business asset. The result was the concept of brand equity which capitalized on a financial term to define a marketing concept. The term was made popular by the publications of David Aaker and Kevin Keller. Aaker described brand equity as a “set of assets (and liabilities) linked to a brand’s name and symbol that adds to (or subtracts from) the value provided by a product or service to a firm and/or that firm’s customers.”1 The main asset categories comprised awareness, loyalty, perceived quality, and other brand specific associations. Despite the use of the term equity, the framework consisted of a combination of market research metrics. Aaker later expanded the framework to include metrics from other models, most notably Y&R’s brand asset evaluator and Interbrand’s brand strength assessment. The resulting measurement framework comprised the following metrics: 1. willingness to pay a price premium; 2. satisfaction/loyalty; 3. perceived quality; 4. leadership/popularity; 5. esteem/respect; 6. perceived value; 7. personality; 8. trust and admiration for the organization; 9. differentiation; 10. market share; 11. price differential; and 12. distribution depth/coverage.