The Constituent Elements Of Brand Equity And Its Impact On Customer Response

In many large cities in China, real estate market has entered into consumers' market from sellers' market, and the focus of competition develops from product to brand. With the market gradually mature, competition between real estate companies is becoming fiercer and fiercer, therefore, constructing excellent brand to get competitive advantage has become many companies' strategic choice. During this course, in order to guide daily brand construction, companies need to know what customer think of an excellent brand, and what influences the brand has on company's performance.Brand equity is one of the most welcomed concepts brought up by American academy in 1980's, and it is the focal point of modern marketing research. Scholars both home and abroad investigated such problems as factors which influence brand equity, the constructs and evaluation of brand equity and its effect mechanism. In addition, they done some practical study in such fields as fast moving consumer goods and service industry. This paper will apply brand equity theory into the industry of real estate, in order to get some useful conclusions.The main body of the paper investigated two problems: Firstly, identified the constructs of customer-based brand equity in real estate companies, and then constructed the measurement scale. Secondly, studied the relationship between the elements of brand equity and three different customer responses: premium price, brand recommendation and brand extension, therefore analyzed the effect of real estate company brand equity elements.This research adopted both nominal analysis and empirical analysis to conduct research. Based on the interview, we constructed an 8-elements brand equity measurement model. Then we did factor analyze to the 198 useful questionnaires, the result showed seven different factors, which are respectively service quality, organization association, perceived value, brand trust, brand awareness, brand personality and brand loyalty. Therefore, we constructed customer-based measurement scale, statistical results showed ideal reliability and validity.In order to probe the effect of brand equity, the research conducted regression analysis, of which seven elements of brand equity are independent variable and the premium price, brand recommendation and brand extension are dependent variable. The result revealed that: service quality, brand trust, organization association and perceived value have significant positive influence on premium price in turn; organization association, brand personality, brand loyalty and service quality have significant positive influence on brand recommendation; organization association, brand personality and service quality have significant positive influence on brand extension. Besides, the research made a comparison between top 50 brands and non-top 50brands based on "the top 50 real estate company brands in Zhe Jiang in 2005", individual sample tests showed that the overall brand equity, premium price, brand recommendation and brand extension of top 50 brands are all higher than those of non-top 50 brands.