Abstract:

The measurement of the "Brand Equity" is more and more requested by Manufacturers: how to evaluate at a fair price the "value" of a Brand? The present paper intends to focus on the consumer side only, the main idea being that the "value" of a Brand must be related to consumer behaviour, its financial aspect being only the result of such behaviour. Mr RA. Schmitz (Unilever USA) mentioned in a previous paper that the "Brand loyal" category of users represents the major part of the profit generated by a Brand: it means that the "value" of a Brand is in some way related to the old concept of "brand loyalty". However, brand loyalty as obtained from questionnaires administrated to consumers is mostly considered as an "attitude" rather than a "behaviour": this is not yet an operational concept, being able to provide some numerical "value" to a given Brand. The most important objective of this paper is to suggest a new way of measuring the "Brand loyalty" based on behaviour, then providing Manufacturers with a long term operational concept derived from scanning records : the main goal of the attitudinal part will then be to tell Manufacturer how this brand loyalty may be influenced by marketing actions.