Brand equity and corporate responsibility : a review of brand valuation methods

Abstract: During the last decades, brand equity has been a priority topic for both practitioners and academics. In accordance with the structural changes in the economic settings caused by the so-called "new economy", corporations being confronted with a shift on perceived business value structure from tangible assets to intangibles. On the other hand firms increasingly are adopting more responsible behaviour towards their societies. In this context, one critical question is to understand how corporate conduct may affect brand equity. The purpose of this study was to find how brand equity (BE) measurement methods embrace corporate responsibility (CR), based on a literature review. Brands can build trust and loyalty among consumers and help them make their purchase decisions faster. In returns, this relation provides adequate wealth that enables corporate to develop their equipments and efficiencies. Likewise, brands create substantial social values in addition to economic values due to increased competition, improved product, process performance and also pressure on business owners to behave in socially responsible manner. Brand evaluation started with traditional economic brand valuation. Financially based approaches tend to place an overall monetary value on brands (Keller, 2008). The comparative approaches on the other hand, tend to assess the impacts of consumer perceptions and preferences on their response to the marketing activities. The insufficiencies in above mentioned approaches gave way to introducing composite approaches such as economic use and real option approaches. Analysing BE evaluations respect to possibility of inclusion of environmental, economic, and social attributes revealed that, in financial based approaches the likelihood of inclusion of social and environmental attributes in their framework is not possible. For customer based approaches on the other hand, the possibility of inclusion these dimensions are limited exist while the economic aspect hardly can be measured or related. Conversely composite approaches, have the possibility of inclusion social and environmental attributes and metrics as well as measures for economic performance of the brand; nevertheless, the empirical data that support this rarely exist. As a final point, the number of articles issued from 1970’s (especially after Bruntland report) showed that in general, CR and BE phenomena gained attention gradually over past decades. The signs of scholars’ attention to the effects of CR on BE is also emerged since last decade while the number of articles are far from separate issues. This study concludes that, in general, we can say that different methods are developed to response and satisfying various business needs over decades. A number of methods are in accordance with privileging production orientation marketing sub-discipline, while other methods applied to product orientation, sales orientation as well as market orientation purposes respectively. Correspondingly, during last decade and after dominating societal marketing orientation we can expect emerging new frameworks to accomplish this relatively new trend.