Building brand equity – In the digital era

Abstract

Building brand equity has always been a focus area of every corporate trying to make their offering stand out from among the plethora of offerings targeting a sizable pie of the total spends in their respective category. There are various conceptual models that explain the ways of building brand equity like Keller’s CBBE framework and Aaker’s Brand Equity model. These models have stood the test of time to conceptualize the route a marketer needs to take to build up his/her brand’s equity. With digitization coming in and the impact of social media, there is a need to understand whether these models continue to hold their forte and can explain how brands continue to build equity in this new environment. This paper uses the CBBE framework as a model to look at the impact digitization has brought into this brand equity building journey for any marketer. It also tries to sketch an updated model that perhaps gives a more complete explanation of brand equity for marketing practitioners.