Research On Brand Equity And Premium Brand

Recently, the market for premium brand has been expanded rapidly. Corporations pay more attention to high-end premium brands which guarantee more returns, and also consumers have become more interested in premium brands with stronger purchasing power. However, studies of premium brand are rarely done in the marketing field. It is true that scholars have different ideas on premium brands and there is no clearly agreed definition of premium brands in the academia. Nevertheless, there are some unique characteristics of premium brands and these characteristics account for a substantial part of premium brand's brand equity. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to find the different brand equity model of premium brand and to show the role of the brand equity components of premium brands.This paper adopts a case study as its research methodology and Lexus, a premium card brand by Toyota, is the subject of analysis. The reason why Lexus is chosen is that it is appraised to have succeeded in building strong brand equity as a premium brand, although it had some barriers for brand building. With market research papers, automobile data, and various articles and books on Lexus, the success of Lexus is analyzed comprehensively and in depth.Through the case study of Lexus, it is proven that premium brands need more features such as perceived superior quality, premium price for value, and social symbolic value beside the basic brand equity components including brand awareness, association, and loyalty. It becomes clear that perceived superior quality is a crucial factor, especially in the early stage of brand building, in creating favorable attitudes by the premium brand consumers. The high price of premium brands affects positively as it becomes an indicator of good quality of the brand, but it also gains more power and affects in reversal when the brand equity of the premium brand has consolidated. The symbolic social value is not created at the very early stage of brand building procedure of premium brands, but it is formed simultaneously as the premium brand becomes known and forms the brand equity.As the subject of case study is automobile and its industry, the model may not be completely suitable for other industries such as apparels or food industries. For these industries, other features might have bigger importance than perceived superior quality. Even though the importance of each brand equity component is different depending on the industries, this model can be applied to most of premium brands.