Sources of brand equity: An investigation in SMEs context

Abstract

Brand equity is considered to be one of the most important organizational resources. The importance of brand equity is not only agreed by large companies but SMEs also can build brand equity to ensure strength of their companies. Brand equity is critical to any organization including in SMEs as it conceptualized based on marketing and financial perspective. Obviously, higher brand equity can increase revenue, lower costs and greater profits. Thus, exploring the sources of brand equity become critical. This study will explore three main long-term branding strategies, which referring to brand experience, brand innovation and brand relationship in developing brand equity. These strategies majority investigated in larger company context previously. However, in this study these strategies are explored in the context of SMEs. Particularly, there are three main objectives in this study that refer to: 1- to investigate the relationship between brand experience and brand equity; 2- to investigate the relationship between brand innovativeness and brand equity; and, 3- to investigate the relationship between brand relationship and brand equity. Interestingly, the result of this study supported the previous study and enhance the importance of brand experience, brand innovativeness, and brand relationship in SMEs brand equity context.