A Brand Equity Model for an Internet Portal Website

Abstract

1 Introduction The value of branded websites as critical elements of an e-commerce strategy is without dispute (Reynolds, 2000; Ward and Lee, 2000; Flores, 2004; Ibeh et al., 2005). Yet knowledge about how the various characteristics of websites influ-ence critical customer brand related cognitions, attitudes and behaviors is in its infancy compared to the non-web commerce world (Argyriou et al., 2006). This paper reports the results of an exploratory empirical investigation into how web-site brand equity is developed in the mind of consumers for a branded internet portal. The study proposes and tests the explanatory power of a customer-based brand equity (CBBE) model formed from indices of brand meaning, brand re-sponses and brand resonance as postulated by Keller (2008). While this perspec-tive has been suggested by a wide variety of previous research findings (Müller and Chandon, 2003; Ha, 2004; Ha and Perks, 2005; Na and Marshall, 2005), this study expands on the previous work by modeling how user experiences with website performance affects brand preferences, brand image perceptions and subsequent brand loyalty and advocacy. The methodology uses a soft modeling approach (Falk and Miller 1992) incorporating perceived brand performance rating scales along with multiple response brand image measures from the brand asset valuator (BAV) (Lebar et al., 2005) and brand preferences derived from ordinal categorizations of brand preferences. The novel and parsimonious use of second order indices allows for different measurement types (interval, ordinal and nominal) to be combined into an integrated cause and effect explanatory framework. The method is not confirmatory, but rather exploratory because it tests for the presence of proposed theoretical relationships among a variety of measures. This paper contains four sections. It begins with a brief review of the key perspectives that formed the basis for the proposed causal framework pre-sented herein and the research questions investigated. It then describes the re-search design and methodology used to investigate the problems and test the hypotheses. The findings are presented and discussed in the third section, and the final section provides a summary of the contribution, limitations and directions for future research.