What is Brand Equity?

Building a brand is like growing a vegetable garden. It takes planning, consistency, and time. By understanding the importance of developing your brand’s equity, you can help to better position yourself in the market and improve the value of your brand. In short, brand equity is the perceived value of a product or service without a brand name attached to it. (Rosenbaume-Elliot 2015)

Brand equity is made up of several factors, we’ll unpack a few of them now and talk about how developing these different assets can build into a stronger brand and more value for your company and products.

Brand Loyalty

We’ve all got brands and products that we swear by. It can be your favorite type of coffee or that gas station that always refills the windshield cleaning stations. Whatever it is, it matters to you for a reason– and there’s a good chance that given the opportunity, you tell people about it. High brand loyalty ensures consistent, stable business and over time can help you capture the larger market share. We measure this by watching return customer rates- this data point is key in showing us that you’re building loyalty and creating repeat customers.

Brand Awareness

You can tell the difference between a Pepsi and a Coke just from the bottle. That’s brand awareness. How recognizable your product or service is to consumers can help capture market share, build loyalty and encourage new customers. This can be accomplished through incredible packaging, use of color, POP placement, search, display, having an incredible content marketing strategy, and a million other factors. It’s all about meeting the customer where they are, and creating an ecosystem around them so that at any point of the consideration journey, they’re seeing your messaging.

Perceived Quality

At TrailHead, we refuse to work with brands whose products and services we don’t believe in. It’s for this exact reason. We believe that high-quality products and services matter. We believe in doing the job right the first time and making sure that consumers are getting their money’s worth.

As it turns out, it matters when we’re talking about brand equity too. Consumers that perceive or understand a product or service to be of higher quality are willing to pay more for it. This perception makes your brand more valuable, more recognizable, and encourages repeat customers. Again, think about that restaurant that makes the perfect burger (not skimping on the pickles) or that plumber that took the extra 10 minutes to clean up thoroughly after they were done fixing your problem. These little details matter.

Building brand equity doesn’t happen overnight. But, by working diligently to drive awareness, ensuring quality, and encouraging consumers to become repeat customers, you’re able to build your brand equity. Over time this increased brand equity can improve your brand’s resilience, reputation, and bottom line. Need more tips to help build your brand? Check out our other articles.