Application of brand equity measures in service markets

Many practitioners and researchers believe that differences exist between service and product markets, which warrant different marketing practices. The branding literature, however, remains biased towards products. This is especially true in the realm of brand equity. Brand equity, however, like many of the branding concepts, has an equally important role in the service markets. For this reason, this study applied ten existing consumer based measures of brand equity to a financial services market (credit cards). The convergent and predictive validity of these measures was assessed, which in turn helped to determine whether these measures that have typically been applied in product markets can be used to capture brand equity in a service market. The results found that most measures were convergent and correlated highly with market share in the predicted direction, where market share was used as an indicator of brand equity. Brand recall and familiarity, however, were found to be the best estimators of brand equity in the credit card market.