Building Customer-Based Brand Equity: A Blueprint for Creating Strong Brands

and others at both organizations for their support and valuable input. Special thanks to Grey Advertising's Ben Arno who suggested the term brand resonance. Additional thanks to workshop participants at Duke University and Dartmouth College. MSI was established in 1961 as a not-for profit institute with the goal of bringing together business leaders and academics to create knowledge that will improve business performance. The primary mission was to provide intellectual leadership in marketing and its allied fields. Over the years, MSI's global network of scholars from leading graduate schools of management and thought leaders from sponsoring corporations has expanded to encompass multiple business functions and disciplines. Issues of key importance to business performance are identified by the Board of Trustees, which represents MSI corporations and the academic community. MSI supports studies by academics on these issues and disseminates the results through conferences and workshops, as well as through its publications series. This report, prepared with the support of MSI, is being sent to you for your information and review. It is not to be reproduced or published, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without written permission from the Institute and the author. Building a strong brand has been shown to provide numerous financial rewards to firms, and has become a top priority for many organizations. In this report, author Keller outlines the Customer-Based Brand Equity (CBBE) model to assist management in their brand-building efforts. According to the model, building a strong brand involves four steps: (1) establishing the proper brand identity, that is, establishing breadth and depth of brand awareness, (2) creating the appropriate brand meaning through strong, favorable, and unique brand associations, (3) eliciting positive, accessible brand responses, and (4) forging brand relationships with customers that are characterized by intense, active loyalty. 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. The most valuable brand-building block, brand resonance, occurs when all the other brand-building blocks are established. With true brand resonance, customers express a high degree of loyalty to the brand such that they actively seek means to interact with the brand and share their experiences with others. Firms that are able to achieve brand resonance should reap a host of benefits, for example, greater price premiums and more efficient and effective marketing programs. The CBBE model provides a yardstick by …