Measuring Global Brand Equity Using Cross-National Survey Data

Abstract

This article presents a newly developed survey-based method for the measurement of customer-based brand equity in a cross-national context. The proposed national brand equity (NBE) model decomposes customer-based brand equity into two components: measured and unmeasured brand equity. Whereas the measured component of brand equity identifies the effectiveness of individual benefit associations across the globe, the unmeasured component captures the value that is attached to the brand but not measured by the commonly elicited associations. The author applies the NBE model to 18 brands across 16 worldwide automobile markets, which provides opportunities for assessing the applicability of the proposed model. Furthermore, in response to the trend of increasing brand globalization, the author develops a model of global brand equity to assess a brand's value relative to that of its global competitors. Based on the NBE model, the global brand equity model incorporates national weighting factors in the aggregation of NBE across countries. The resultant aggregation yields a global brand equity index, which provides practical applications for benchmarking against the best brand and serves as a good indicator of a brand's relative value in the global market.