Customer-Based Brand Equity in Marketing Strategies

Customer-based brand equity (CBBE) refers to the value added to a product or service by consumer perceptions, attitudes and behaviours towards a brand. It is built upon a hierarchy of cognitive and affective responses, often conceptualised through dimensions such as brand awareness, brand associations, perceived quality, brand loyalty and other proprietary brand assets. Effective marketing strategies harness these dimensions to create favourable customer experiences, cultivate trust and foster advocacy, thereby enabling premium pricing, resistance to competitive actions and long-term market share gains. In practice, firms deploy integrated communications, sponsorships, digital engagement and experiential initiatives to shape and reinforce the elements of CBBE. Recent advances emphasise the dynamic, nonlinear progression of equity building, the role of network effects and peer influence, and the interaction between economic and sociological drivers of consumer choice. Across global markets, CBBE underpins strategies for localisation, co-creation and sustainability branding, with implications for product development, pricing, distribution and stakeholder relationships. By aligning brand identity with evolving consumer values and behaviour patterns, organisations can leverage customer-based equity to achieve resilience in volatile environments and to support transformative growth.

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Customer-Based Brand Equity in Marketing Strategies publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in customer-based brand equity in marketing strategies across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Brand awareness: The extent to which consumers can recall and recognise a brand under various conditions.

Brand associations: The network of mental links connecting a brand to attributes, benefits, and attitudes in the consumer’s mind.

Perceived quality: The consumer’s judgment of a product’s overall excellence or superiority relative to alternatives.

Brand loyalty: A consumer’s commitment to repurchase or otherwise continue using a brand, despite situational influences or marketing efforts from competitors.

Brand competitiveness: A formal construct capturing how economic, sociological and marketing dimensions jointly influence consumer brand choice and equity creation.

References

1. Why do consumers prefer one brand over another? The economics and sociology of brand competitiveness. Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services (2023).
2. Effects of the intensity of use of social media on brand equity. European Journal of Management and Business Economics (2018).
3. Managing the consumer-based brand equity process: A cross-cultural perspective. International Business Review (2019).
4. Reviewing the Concept of Brand Equity and Evaluating Consumer-Based Brand Equity (CBBE) Models. International Journal of Management Science and Business Administration (2015).