Consumer-Based Brand Equity: Improving the Measurement - Empirical Evidence

Abstract

If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.com Emerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services. Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation. Introduction The halo effect (halo error) was first described in the psychology literature around the turn of this century. Thorndike[1] coined the term in connection with his observation that supervisors seemed unable to rate their subordinates independently on different (presumably independent) characteristics. Rather, supervisors' ratings exhibited a consistently high correlation with their global impression of the subordinate being rated. In an early study involving the evaluation of teachers, for example, rated intelligence was highly correlated with rated ability to discipline (0.80), even though rated ability to discipline was correlated at only 0.30 with intelligence as measured by standard tests. In the context of personnel evaluations, the halo effect is seen as distorting ratings on the individual dimensions, and is thus a source of error to be avoided. Marketing researchers face a similar problem in connection with the use of multi-attribute rating models which are employed for product evaluations. If evaluations of individual product attributes are influenced by a person's overall attitude (global affect) towards the product being rated, then the individual attribute ratings may be similarly distorted. Such distortion, in turn, may result in misleading conclusions about competitive positioning, and may even lead brand managers to make erroneous decisions concerning product modifications and product strategy. Accordingly, there has been considerable attention in the marketing literature given to understanding the halo effect and its consequences for brand evaluation. The notion of brand equity, a topic of more recent interest, has much in common with the halo effect, and marketers interested in assessing brand equity can benefit from prior research on the halo effect and its measurement. Although definitions of brand equity vary, a commonly accepted view is that brand equity represents the value (to a consumer) of a product, above that which would result for an otherwise identical product without the brand's name[2]. In other words, brand equity represents the degree to which a brand's name alone contributes value to the offering (again, from the perspective of the consumer). The purpose of this article is to present a methodology for measuring brand equity, borrowing from extant research on the halo effect. The article begins with a brief overview of the halo effect, and then focuses on research directed toward the measurement of halo. We demonstrate the usefulness of halo effect measures for assessing brand equity. An illustrative example, using consumer rating data for commonly purchased household products, is used to explain the method.