Brand equity model development: Hero Group brand equity post JV split

Abstract

Brand represents enormously valuable pieces of legal property, capable of influencing consumer behaviour, being bought and sold and providing security of sustained future revenues to their owner. The value directly or indirectly accrued by these various benefits is often called brand equity. Brand equity can be thought of as the "added value" endowed to a product in the thoughts, words and actions of consumers. Brand equity is fairly subjective with its value dependent on the consumer's experiences and learnings of the product over time. On a conceptual level the definition of brand equity has been well understood by both the academicians and the practitioners (marketers) and there is reasonable similarity and agreement in the way brand equity has been built using advertising and associations by various companies. However unlike the development in the conceptual level, there has been no significant progress on measurement methods for understanding the sources of brand equity such as attribute perceptions. An understanding of where the equities of the firm's and the competitors' brand comes from is obviously essential for brand managers to enhance their brand equity relative to those of the competitive brands. Various approaches have been tried by researchers but all of them have certain limitations. Aaker model is one of the most popular models used often to describe brand equity. However for our case the model would not work since most of the equity metrics employed in the model would not capture any decrease in the brand equity. The components of this model are brand loyalty, brand recognition, brand awareness etc which we believe will not be affected much by the split. Moreover there is no scope of capturing any quantitative decrease in the equity value.