Building a strong brand, according to the Customer-Based Brand Equity model, can be thought of in terms of a sequence of steps, in which each step is contingent upon the successful completion of the previous step. All steps involve accomplishing certain objectives with customers, both existing and potential. The first step is to ensure identification of the brand with customers and an association of the brand in customers' minds with a specific product class or customer need. the second step is to firmly establish the brand meaning in the minds of customers by strategically linking a host tangible and intangible brand associations. The third step is to elicit the proper customer responses to this brand identity and brand meaning. The fourth and final step is to convert brand response to create an intense, active loyalty relationship between customers and the brand.
These four steps represent a set of fundamental questions that customers invariably ask about brands, implicitly if not explicitly:
Who are you? (brand identity)
What are you? (brand meaning)
What about you? What do I think or feel about you? (brand responses)
What about you and me? What kind of association and how much of a connection would I like to have with you? (brand relationships)
There is an obvious sequence in this "branding ladder,", that is, meaning cannot be established unless identity has been created; responses cannot occur unless the right meaning has been developed; and a relationship cannot be forged unless the proper responses have been elicited.
Figure 1. Customer-Based Brand Equity Pyramid
Establishing the four steps to create the right brand identity, brand meaning, brand respond, and brand relationships is a complicated and difficult process. To provide some structure, it is useful to think of six "brand-building triangles" to accomplish the four steps necessary to create a strong brand. To connote the sequencing involved, these building blocks ca be assembled as a brand pyramid. Creating significant brand equity involves reaching the pinnacle of the pyramid and will only occur if the right brand-building triangles are in place. The corresponding brand steps represent different levels of the pyramid as illustrated in Figure 1.
Figure 2. Examines each of the building blocks in detail.
These four steps represent a set of fundamental questions that customers invariably ask about brands, implicitly if not explicitly:
Who are you? (brand identity)
What are you? (brand meaning)
What about you? What do I think or feel about you? (brand responses)
What about you and me? What kind of association and how much of a connection would I like to have with you? (brand relationships)
There is an obvious sequence in this "branding ladder,", that is, meaning cannot be established unless identity has been created; responses cannot occur unless the right meaning has been developed; and a relationship cannot be forged unless the proper responses have been elicited.
Figure 1. Customer-Based Brand Equity Pyramid
Establishing the four steps to create the right brand identity, brand meaning, brand respond, and brand relationships is a complicated and difficult process. To provide some structure, it is useful to think of six "brand-building triangles" to accomplish the four steps necessary to create a strong brand. To connote the sequencing involved, these building blocks ca be assembled as a brand pyramid. Creating significant brand equity involves reaching the pinnacle of the pyramid and will only occur if the right brand-building triangles are in place. The corresponding brand steps represent different levels of the pyramid as illustrated in Figure 1.
Figure 2. Examines each of the building blocks in detail.
Brand identity
1. Brand salience: Achieving the right brand identity involves creating brand salience which relates to aspects of customer awareness of the brand. How easily and often is the brand evoked under various situations or circumstances? To what extent is the brand top-of-mind and easily recalled or recognized? What types of cues or reminders are necessary? How pervasive is brand awareness?
- Formally, brand awareness refers to customers' ability to recall and recognize a brand. Brand awareness is more than just the fact that customers know a brand name and the fact that they have previously seen it, perhaps even many times. Brand awareness also involves linking the brand - brand name, logo, symbol, and so forth - to certain associations in memory. In particular, building brand awareness involves making sure that customers understand the product or service category in which the brand competes. There must be clear link to other products or services sold under the brand name. At a broader, more abstract level, however, building brand awareness also means ensuring that customers know which of their needs the brand is designed to satisfy - through these products. In other words, what basic functions does the brand provide for customers?
For example Nike: Simplicity of "Swoosh" logo builds sense of curiosity
2. Brand meaning
- Brand salience is an important first step in building equity, but is usually not sufficient in and of itself. For most customers in most situations, other considerations, such as the meaning or image of the brand, also come into play. Creating brand meaning involves establishing a brand image - what the brand is characterized by and should stand for in the minds of customers. Although a myriad of different types of brand associations are possible, brand meaning can broadly be distinguished in terms of functional, performance-related considerations versus abstract, imagery-related considerations. Thus, brand meaning is made up of two major categories of brand associations that exist in customers' minds - related to performance and imagery - with a set of specific subcategories within each. These brand associations can be formed directly - from a customer's own experiences and contact with the brand - or indirectly - through the depiction of the brand in advertising or by some other source of information.
3. Brand performance.
- The product itself is at the heart of brand equity, as it is the primary influence of what consumers experience with a brand, what they hear about brand from others, and what the firm can tell customers about the brand in their communications. Designing and delivering a product that fully satisfies consumer needs and wants is prerequisite for successful marketing, regardless of whether the product is a tangible good, service, or organization. To create brand loyalty and resonance, consumers' experiences with the product must at least meet, if not actually surpass, their expectations.
Numerous studies have shown that high quality brands tend to perform better financially, for example, yielding higher returns on investment.
Brand performance relates to the ways in which the product or service attempts to meet customers' more functional needs. Thus, brand performance refers to the intrinsic properties of the brand in terms of inherent product or service characteristics. How well does the brand satisfy the utilitarian, aesthetic, and economic needs and wants of customers in its product or service category?
The specific performance attributes and benefits that constitute functionality will vary widely by category. Nevertheless, there are five important types of attributes and benefits that often underlie brand performance:
a. Primary characteristics and secondary features. Customers often hold beliefs about the levels at which the primary characteristics of a product operate (e.g, low, medium, high, or very high). They may also hold beliefs about special, perhaps even patented, features or secondary elements of a product that complement these primary characteristics.
b. Product reliability, durability, and serviceability. As noted, customers can view the performance of products or services in a broad manner. Reliability refers to the consistency of performance over time and from purchase to purchase. Durability refers to the expected economic life of the product. Serviceability refers to the ease of servicing the product if is needs repair. Thus, perceptions of product performance are impacted by factors such as speed, accuracy, and care of product delivery and installation; the promptness, courtesy, and helpfulness of customer service and training; the quality of repair service and the time involved; and so on.
c. Service effectiveness, efficiency and empathy. Customers often have performance related associations with the service interactions they have with brands. Along those lines, service effectiveness refers to how completely the brand satisfies customers' service requirements. Service efficiency refers to the manner in which these services are delivered in terms of speed, responsiveness, and so forth. Finally, service empathy refers to the extent to which service providers are seen as trusting, caring, and having the customer's interests in mind.
d. Style and design. Consumers may have associations with a product that go beyond its functional aspects to more aesthetic considerations such as its size, shape, materials, and color. Thus, performance may also depend on sensory aspects, How a product looks and feels and perhaps even what it sounds or smells like.
e. Price. The pricing policy for the brand can create associations in consumers' minds to the relevant price tier or level for the brand in the category, as well as to its corresponding price volatility or variance (in terms of the frequency or magnitude of discounts, etc.). In other words, the pricing strategy adopted for a brand can dictate how consumers categorize the price of the brand (e.g, low, medium, or high) and how firm or flexible that price is perceived to be (e.g., as frequently or infrequently discounted).
Brand performance thus transcends the "ingredients" that make up the product or service to encompass aspects of the brand that augment these ingredients. Any of these different performance dimensions can serve as a means by which the brand is differentiated. Often, the strongest brand positioning involves performance advantages of some kind, and it is rare that a brand can overcome severe deficiencies in this area.
4. Brand imagery. The other main type of brand meaning involves brand imagery. Brand imagery deals with the extrinsic properties of the product of service, including the ways in which the brand attempts to meet customers' psychological or social needs. Brand imagery is how people think about a brand abstractly rather than what they think the brand actually does. Thus, imagery refers to more intangible aspects of the brand.
Many different kinds of intangibles can be linked to a brand, but four categories can be highlighted:
a. User profiles. One set of brand imagery associations involves the type of person or organization who uses the brand. This imagery may result in a profile or mental image by customers of actual users or more aspiration, idealized users. Associations of a typical or idealized brand user may be based on descriptive demographic factors or more abstract psychographic factors. Demographic factors might include gender, age, race, income, and marital status.
b. Purchase and usage situations. A second set of associations concerns the conditions under which the brand could or should be bought and used. Associations of a typical purchase situation may be based on a number of different considerations such as:
- Type of channel (physical store, online store e.g)
- Specific store (Samsung store, Nike store e.g)
- Ease of purchase and associated rewards
c. Personality and value. Brands may also take on personality traits and values similar to those of people. Brand personality is often related to the more descriptive usage imagery but involves much richer, more contextual information. Five dimensions of brand personality that have been identified are:
- Sincerity (e.g., down-to-earth, honest, wholesome, and cheerful)
- Excitement (e.g., daring, spirited, imaginative, and up-to-date)
- Competence (e.g., reliable, intelligent, successful)
- Sophistication (e.g.,upper-class and charming)
- Ruggedness (e.g.,outdoorsy and tough)
d. History, heritage, and experience. Brands may take on associations with their past and with certain noteworthy events in the brand history. These types of associations may involve distinctly personal experiences and episodes or be related to past behaviors and experiences of friends, family, or others.
5. Brand responses
Brand responses refer to how customers respond to the brand, its marketing activity, and other sources of information, that is, what customers think or feel about the brand. Brand responses can be distinguished according to brand judgments and brand feelings, that is, in terms of whether they arise more from the "head" or from the "heart."
Brand Judgments. Brand judgments focus upon customers' personal opinion and evaluations with regard to the brand. Brand judgments involve how customers put together all the different performance and imagery associations for the brand to form different kinds of opinions. Customers may make all types of judgments with respects to a brand, but in terms of creating a strong brand, four types of summary brand judgments are particularly important.
a. Brand quality. There are a host of attitudes that customers may hold toward brands, but the most important relate in various ways to the perceived quality of the brand. Other notable attitudes related to quality pertain to perceptions of value and satisfaction.
b. Brand credibility. Customers may form judgments that transcend specific brand quality concerns to consider broader issues related to the company or organization making the product or providing the service associated with the brand. In other words, customers may form judgments with respect to the company or organization behind the brand.
c. Brand consideration. Eliciting favorable brand attitudes and perceptions of credibility is important but may be insufficient if customers do not actually seriously consider the brand for possible purchase or usage. Consideration is more than mere awareness of a brand; it suggest the likelihook that customers will actually include the brand in the set of brands they might buy or use. Consideration depends in part on how personally relevant customers find the brand, that is, the extent to which they view the brand as being appropriate and meaningful for themselves. Thus, customers often make an overall appraisal as to whether they have any personal interest in a brand and whether they would or should ever buy that brand. Brand consideration is a crucial filter in terms of building brand equity.
d. Brand superiority. Superiority relates to the extent to which customers view the brand as unique and better than other brands. In other words, do customers believe that the brand offers advantages that other brands do not?
e. Brand feelings. Brand feelings are customers' emotional response and reactions with respects to the brand. Brand feelings also relate to the social currency evoked by the brand. What feelings are evoked by the marketing program for the brand or by other means? How does the brand effect customers' feeling about themselves and their relationship with others? These feelings can be mild or intense, positive or negative, in nature. There are six important types of brand-building feelings:
Warmth. Warmth refers to soothing types of feelings-the extent to which the brand makes consumers feel a sense of calm or peacefulness. Consumers may feel sentimental, warmhearted, or affectionate about brand.
Fun. Feeling of fun are also upbeat types of feelings. Consumers may feel amused, lighthearted, joyous, playful, cheerful, and so on.
Excitement. Excitement relates to the extent to which the brand makes consumers feel that they are energized, and are experiencing something special. Brands that evoke feelings of excitement may result in a sense of elation or "being alive"; the customer may feel cool, sexy, and so forth.
Security. Security feelings occur when the brand produces a feeling of safety, comfort, and self-assurance in the customer, who associates the brand with the elimination of worries or concerns they might otherwise have felt.
Social approval. Social approval occurs when the brand results in consumers' feeling positively about the reactions of other to them; that is, when consumers feel that others look favorably on their appearance, behavior, and so forth. This approval may result from others' direct acknowledgement of the consumer using the brand or, less overtly, from attributing the product itself to consumers.
Self-respect. Self-respect occurs when the brand makes consumers feel better about themselves, for example, when consumers feel a sense of pride, accomplishment, or fulfillment.
6. Brand relationships
Brand resonance. The final step of the model focuses upon the ultimate relationship and level of identification that the customer has with the brand. Brand resonance refers to the nature of the relationship that customers have with the brand and the extent to which they feel that they are "in synch" with the brand. Brand resonance is characterized in terms of intensity of the depth of the psychological bond that customers have with the brand as well as the level of activity engendered by this loyalty (e.g., repeat purchase rates, the extent to which customers seek out brand information, events, other loyal customers, and so on.). Specifically, brand resonance can be broken down into four categories:
- Behavioral loyalty. The first dimension of brand resonance is behavioral loyalty in terms of repeat purchases and the amount, or share, of category volume attributed to the brand. In other words, how often do customers purchase a brand and how much do they purchase? For bottom-line profit results, the brand should generate sufficient purchase frequencies and volumes.
- Attitudinal attachment. Behavioral loyalty is necessary but not sufficient for resonance to occur. Some customers may buy out of necessity - for example, because the brand is only product being stocked or readily accessible, or the only one they can afford to buy, and so on. To create resonance, a strong personal attachment is also necessary. Customer must go beyond simply having a positive attitude to view the brand as being something special in a broader context.
- Sense of community. The brand may also take on broader meaning to the customer in term of a sense of community. Identification with a brand community may reflect an important social phenomenon whereby customers feel a kinship or affiliation with other people associated with the brand. These connections may involve fellow brand users or customers or instead, employees or representatives of the company.
- Active engagement. Perhaps the strongest affirmation of brand loyalty occurs when customers are willing to invest time, energy, money, or other resources into the brand beyond those expended during purchase or consumption of the brand.
In conclusion, The Customer-Based Brand Equity (CBBE) model maintains that building a strong brand involves a series of logical steps:
1. Establishing the proper brand identity
2. Creating the appropriate brand meaning
3. Eliciting the right brand response
4. Forging appropriate brand relationships with customers
Achieving these four steps, in turn, involves establishing six brand-building blocks - brand salience, brand performance, brand imagery, brand judgments, brand feelings, and brand resonance.
Ex: In today's extremely competitive environment, Nike is the global leader of the sporting goods industry and has established itself in a strong position for enhancing people's athletic life style.
1. Brand salience: Achieving the right brand identity involves creating brand salience which relates to aspects of customer awareness of the brand. How easily and often is the brand evoked under various situations or circumstances? To what extent is the brand top-of-mind and easily recalled or recognized? What types of cues or reminders are necessary? How pervasive is brand awareness?
- Formally, brand awareness refers to customers' ability to recall and recognize a brand. Brand awareness is more than just the fact that customers know a brand name and the fact that they have previously seen it, perhaps even many times. Brand awareness also involves linking the brand - brand name, logo, symbol, and so forth - to certain associations in memory. In particular, building brand awareness involves making sure that customers understand the product or service category in which the brand competes. There must be clear link to other products or services sold under the brand name. At a broader, more abstract level, however, building brand awareness also means ensuring that customers know which of their needs the brand is designed to satisfy - through these products. In other words, what basic functions does the brand provide for customers?
For example Nike: Simplicity of "Swoosh" logo builds sense of curiosity
2. Brand meaning
- Brand salience is an important first step in building equity, but is usually not sufficient in and of itself. For most customers in most situations, other considerations, such as the meaning or image of the brand, also come into play. Creating brand meaning involves establishing a brand image - what the brand is characterized by and should stand for in the minds of customers. Although a myriad of different types of brand associations are possible, brand meaning can broadly be distinguished in terms of functional, performance-related considerations versus abstract, imagery-related considerations. Thus, brand meaning is made up of two major categories of brand associations that exist in customers' minds - related to performance and imagery - with a set of specific subcategories within each. These brand associations can be formed directly - from a customer's own experiences and contact with the brand - or indirectly - through the depiction of the brand in advertising or by some other source of information.
3. Brand performance.
- The product itself is at the heart of brand equity, as it is the primary influence of what consumers experience with a brand, what they hear about brand from others, and what the firm can tell customers about the brand in their communications. Designing and delivering a product that fully satisfies consumer needs and wants is prerequisite for successful marketing, regardless of whether the product is a tangible good, service, or organization. To create brand loyalty and resonance, consumers' experiences with the product must at least meet, if not actually surpass, their expectations.
Numerous studies have shown that high quality brands tend to perform better financially, for example, yielding higher returns on investment.
Brand performance relates to the ways in which the product or service attempts to meet customers' more functional needs. Thus, brand performance refers to the intrinsic properties of the brand in terms of inherent product or service characteristics. How well does the brand satisfy the utilitarian, aesthetic, and economic needs and wants of customers in its product or service category?
The specific performance attributes and benefits that constitute functionality will vary widely by category. Nevertheless, there are five important types of attributes and benefits that often underlie brand performance:
a. Primary characteristics and secondary features. Customers often hold beliefs about the levels at which the primary characteristics of a product operate (e.g, low, medium, high, or very high). They may also hold beliefs about special, perhaps even patented, features or secondary elements of a product that complement these primary characteristics.
b. Product reliability, durability, and serviceability. As noted, customers can view the performance of products or services in a broad manner. Reliability refers to the consistency of performance over time and from purchase to purchase. Durability refers to the expected economic life of the product. Serviceability refers to the ease of servicing the product if is needs repair. Thus, perceptions of product performance are impacted by factors such as speed, accuracy, and care of product delivery and installation; the promptness, courtesy, and helpfulness of customer service and training; the quality of repair service and the time involved; and so on.
c. Service effectiveness, efficiency and empathy. Customers often have performance related associations with the service interactions they have with brands. Along those lines, service effectiveness refers to how completely the brand satisfies customers' service requirements. Service efficiency refers to the manner in which these services are delivered in terms of speed, responsiveness, and so forth. Finally, service empathy refers to the extent to which service providers are seen as trusting, caring, and having the customer's interests in mind.
d. Style and design. Consumers may have associations with a product that go beyond its functional aspects to more aesthetic considerations such as its size, shape, materials, and color. Thus, performance may also depend on sensory aspects, How a product looks and feels and perhaps even what it sounds or smells like.
e. Price. The pricing policy for the brand can create associations in consumers' minds to the relevant price tier or level for the brand in the category, as well as to its corresponding price volatility or variance (in terms of the frequency or magnitude of discounts, etc.). In other words, the pricing strategy adopted for a brand can dictate how consumers categorize the price of the brand (e.g, low, medium, or high) and how firm or flexible that price is perceived to be (e.g., as frequently or infrequently discounted).
Brand performance thus transcends the "ingredients" that make up the product or service to encompass aspects of the brand that augment these ingredients. Any of these different performance dimensions can serve as a means by which the brand is differentiated. Often, the strongest brand positioning involves performance advantages of some kind, and it is rare that a brand can overcome severe deficiencies in this area.
4. Brand imagery. The other main type of brand meaning involves brand imagery. Brand imagery deals with the extrinsic properties of the product of service, including the ways in which the brand attempts to meet customers' psychological or social needs. Brand imagery is how people think about a brand abstractly rather than what they think the brand actually does. Thus, imagery refers to more intangible aspects of the brand.
Many different kinds of intangibles can be linked to a brand, but four categories can be highlighted:
a. User profiles. One set of brand imagery associations involves the type of person or organization who uses the brand. This imagery may result in a profile or mental image by customers of actual users or more aspiration, idealized users. Associations of a typical or idealized brand user may be based on descriptive demographic factors or more abstract psychographic factors. Demographic factors might include gender, age, race, income, and marital status.
b. Purchase and usage situations. A second set of associations concerns the conditions under which the brand could or should be bought and used. Associations of a typical purchase situation may be based on a number of different considerations such as:
- Type of channel (physical store, online store e.g)
- Specific store (Samsung store, Nike store e.g)
- Ease of purchase and associated rewards
c. Personality and value. Brands may also take on personality traits and values similar to those of people. Brand personality is often related to the more descriptive usage imagery but involves much richer, more contextual information. Five dimensions of brand personality that have been identified are:
- Sincerity (e.g., down-to-earth, honest, wholesome, and cheerful)
- Excitement (e.g., daring, spirited, imaginative, and up-to-date)
- Competence (e.g., reliable, intelligent, successful)
- Sophistication (e.g.,upper-class and charming)
- Ruggedness (e.g.,outdoorsy and tough)
d. History, heritage, and experience. Brands may take on associations with their past and with certain noteworthy events in the brand history. These types of associations may involve distinctly personal experiences and episodes or be related to past behaviors and experiences of friends, family, or others.
5. Brand responses
Brand responses refer to how customers respond to the brand, its marketing activity, and other sources of information, that is, what customers think or feel about the brand. Brand responses can be distinguished according to brand judgments and brand feelings, that is, in terms of whether they arise more from the "head" or from the "heart."
Brand Judgments. Brand judgments focus upon customers' personal opinion and evaluations with regard to the brand. Brand judgments involve how customers put together all the different performance and imagery associations for the brand to form different kinds of opinions. Customers may make all types of judgments with respects to a brand, but in terms of creating a strong brand, four types of summary brand judgments are particularly important.
a. Brand quality. There are a host of attitudes that customers may hold toward brands, but the most important relate in various ways to the perceived quality of the brand. Other notable attitudes related to quality pertain to perceptions of value and satisfaction.
b. Brand credibility. Customers may form judgments that transcend specific brand quality concerns to consider broader issues related to the company or organization making the product or providing the service associated with the brand. In other words, customers may form judgments with respect to the company or organization behind the brand.
c. Brand consideration. Eliciting favorable brand attitudes and perceptions of credibility is important but may be insufficient if customers do not actually seriously consider the brand for possible purchase or usage. Consideration is more than mere awareness of a brand; it suggest the likelihook that customers will actually include the brand in the set of brands they might buy or use. Consideration depends in part on how personally relevant customers find the brand, that is, the extent to which they view the brand as being appropriate and meaningful for themselves. Thus, customers often make an overall appraisal as to whether they have any personal interest in a brand and whether they would or should ever buy that brand. Brand consideration is a crucial filter in terms of building brand equity.
d. Brand superiority. Superiority relates to the extent to which customers view the brand as unique and better than other brands. In other words, do customers believe that the brand offers advantages that other brands do not?
e. Brand feelings. Brand feelings are customers' emotional response and reactions with respects to the brand. Brand feelings also relate to the social currency evoked by the brand. What feelings are evoked by the marketing program for the brand or by other means? How does the brand effect customers' feeling about themselves and their relationship with others? These feelings can be mild or intense, positive or negative, in nature. There are six important types of brand-building feelings:
Warmth. Warmth refers to soothing types of feelings-the extent to which the brand makes consumers feel a sense of calm or peacefulness. Consumers may feel sentimental, warmhearted, or affectionate about brand.
Fun. Feeling of fun are also upbeat types of feelings. Consumers may feel amused, lighthearted, joyous, playful, cheerful, and so on.
Excitement. Excitement relates to the extent to which the brand makes consumers feel that they are energized, and are experiencing something special. Brands that evoke feelings of excitement may result in a sense of elation or "being alive"; the customer may feel cool, sexy, and so forth.
Security. Security feelings occur when the brand produces a feeling of safety, comfort, and self-assurance in the customer, who associates the brand with the elimination of worries or concerns they might otherwise have felt.
Social approval. Social approval occurs when the brand results in consumers' feeling positively about the reactions of other to them; that is, when consumers feel that others look favorably on their appearance, behavior, and so forth. This approval may result from others' direct acknowledgement of the consumer using the brand or, less overtly, from attributing the product itself to consumers.
Self-respect. Self-respect occurs when the brand makes consumers feel better about themselves, for example, when consumers feel a sense of pride, accomplishment, or fulfillment.
6. Brand relationships
Brand resonance. The final step of the model focuses upon the ultimate relationship and level of identification that the customer has with the brand. Brand resonance refers to the nature of the relationship that customers have with the brand and the extent to which they feel that they are "in synch" with the brand. Brand resonance is characterized in terms of intensity of the depth of the psychological bond that customers have with the brand as well as the level of activity engendered by this loyalty (e.g., repeat purchase rates, the extent to which customers seek out brand information, events, other loyal customers, and so on.). Specifically, brand resonance can be broken down into four categories:
- Behavioral loyalty. The first dimension of brand resonance is behavioral loyalty in terms of repeat purchases and the amount, or share, of category volume attributed to the brand. In other words, how often do customers purchase a brand and how much do they purchase? For bottom-line profit results, the brand should generate sufficient purchase frequencies and volumes.
- Attitudinal attachment. Behavioral loyalty is necessary but not sufficient for resonance to occur. Some customers may buy out of necessity - for example, because the brand is only product being stocked or readily accessible, or the only one they can afford to buy, and so on. To create resonance, a strong personal attachment is also necessary. Customer must go beyond simply having a positive attitude to view the brand as being something special in a broader context.
- Sense of community. The brand may also take on broader meaning to the customer in term of a sense of community. Identification with a brand community may reflect an important social phenomenon whereby customers feel a kinship or affiliation with other people associated with the brand. These connections may involve fellow brand users or customers or instead, employees or representatives of the company.
- Active engagement. Perhaps the strongest affirmation of brand loyalty occurs when customers are willing to invest time, energy, money, or other resources into the brand beyond those expended during purchase or consumption of the brand.
In conclusion, The Customer-Based Brand Equity (CBBE) model maintains that building a strong brand involves a series of logical steps:
1. Establishing the proper brand identity
2. Creating the appropriate brand meaning
3. Eliciting the right brand response
4. Forging appropriate brand relationships with customers
Achieving these four steps, in turn, involves establishing six brand-building blocks - brand salience, brand performance, brand imagery, brand judgments, brand feelings, and brand resonance.
Ex: In today's extremely competitive environment, Nike is the global leader of the sporting goods industry and has established itself in a strong position for enhancing people's athletic life style.