Retailer Brand Equity: An Approach Based on Store Image

Abstract

Although a long stream of research has been devoted over the last two decades to the definition and the measurement of the brand equity (Leuthesser 1988; Farquhar 1989; Aaker 1991, 1996; Keller 1993), little attention has been paid to the equity of the retailer as a brand. However, retailers are predominant actors in our current society since they build the bridge between manufacturers and consumers (Baldauf et al. 2009). On the one hand, they are crucial for manufacturers insofar as retailers can choose to remove a brand or to provide it more shelf space, depending on the impact the brand has on the retailer’s performance. On the other hand, they gather in the same outlets various brands and products at competitive prices, making shopping more convenient and pleasant for customers. The main objective of this work is to offer a proper definition and conceptualization of retailer brand equity from the consumer’s perspective that can serve for both researchers and practitioners since we emphasize that former measures badly reflect the concrete “added value” of some retailers (Ailawadi and Keller 2004).