What is brand equity research?

The concept is simple enough to understand and intuitively true, but brand equity is also notoriously difficult to measure. There is no agreed single definition of how to do this, with many different firms offering their own models and indexes.

The first question you need to ask when setting out to measure brand equity is where you want to measure it:

• Do you want to understand the total value added to the organization by the brand?
• The additional revenue generated from sales of a particular product or product group as a result of a brand?
• The perceived positivity of a brand in the mind of a customer?

Alternative approaches generally involve the creation of an index to measure relative brand equity between companies in a market. These measures tend to be based on subjective assessment of the relative impact of various factors informed by experience and supporting research. Factors included might be:

• market share
• relative pricing of equivalent products
• customer retention rates

The approach to measuring this is generally more consistent as Conjoint Analysis is a natural fit for this task.

The output of the analysis is a model of customer choices and we can simulate the current competitive market situation for a product category and compare this with the prediction if we replace our products with unbranded equivalents.

This can establish a “price premium” customers are willing to pay but can also be used to estimate the total additional revenue across the market for that product by identifying and comparing the total expected revenue for the branded and unbranded offerings at optimal prices.

The basic starting point for measuring and comparing the appeal of brands to customers is to collect information about the breadth and quality of brand recall as well as measuring the associations the brand has with brand attributes. After this though, the approach to interpreting the results can vary a lot, with consultancies and agencies often having their own proprietary approaches to evaluating the positivity of brand perceptions.

At B2B International, we understand that most B2B markets are very different in terms of what attributes are important. With this in mind, as a leading brand equity research company, our preferred approach is to use regression modelling to identify key drivers of engagement for the market we are investigating and to use this to develop a bespoke measure of appeal for the brand in that market.