| Brand equity assessment has been growing in importance. There are three perspectives of brand equity assessment: customer-based, financial-based, and company-based; each affects stakeholder's decisions in different ways. For example, Brand equity can affect a company's marketing decisions, whether to allocate more funds to the marketing division, investors' decisions, whether to invest in a certain company's stock based on its products' performance in the markets, and consumers' decisions, whether to buy a certain brand, to continue buying a certain brand, and to establish a long-term customer relationship.;This paper studies the question of whether product-market and customer-market equity can lead to financial-market equity by influencing investor decisions. Two sources were used to arrive at an answer to the above research question, Interbrand methodology and the Bloomberg database. Correlation and regression analysis were conducted to find a relationship between the two variables, the Interbrand brand value (published annually in BusinessWeek magazine) and the market equity capitalization, from the year 2001 to 2005 for 63 global brand names. The results show a positive relation between the brand value and the market equity capitalization, through which the conclusion to this study is that brand value does, in part, affect investors' decisions. To further support the findings, the predicted market equity capitalization, calculated from the regression equation, was compared to the actual market equity capitalization for selected companies. |
