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Building and managing strong brands to promote brand equity is considered as one of the most critical tasks in brand management (He, Li & Harris, 2012). Some of the most trusted brands have existed for more than 150 years. Those brands are successful in creating and maintaining a good relationship with their customers and can allow firms to gain competitive advantages. Brands that have higher equity can result in higher brand awareness, higher perceived quality, stronger brand associations, and better brand value (Emari, Jafari, & Mogaddam, 2012). Brand value may further relate to the thinking, feeling, and acting of consumers with respect to the brand and consumption behaviors (Keller & Kotler, 2012). As a result, a strong brand can provide a series of benefits for a firm, including a higher customer loyalty, more licensing, brand extension opportunities, higher resiliency to response to price change, which may further result in higher profit margin (Fischer & Himme, 2017; Foroudi et al., 2018; Emari et al., 2012). Therefore, the emergence of brand equity has created the importance of marketing strategies for the building of brand awareness, brand association, brand image, and brand loyalty. Brand equity is almost centered around every single marketing activity. Furthermore, high brand equity also increases the richness, reliability and creditability firms and product information, as well as reduces the perceived risk from lack of information. However, despite the progress of the previous studies, the results are still inconclusive because a structural relationships framework to integrate different dimensions of brand equity is yet to be fully developed.
First of all, the definition of brand equity has been evolved since the 1980s in various ways. Perhaps, one of the most famous and most cited definitions is from Aaker (1991). The author referred brand equity as “a set of brand assets and liabilities linked to a brand, its name and symbol, that adds to or subtracts from the value provided by a product or a service to a firm and/ or to that firm’s customers”. The majority of researchers have adopted the concepts of Aaker (1991) and Keller (1993) to examine the dimensions of brand equity using customer-based brand equity (CBBE) (Pike et al., 2010). Keller and Lehmann (2006) summarized three different measurement approaches to brand equity such as business-based, customer-based and financial-based. Meanwhile, Trent and Mohr (2017) explained brand equity from a financial perspective as an additional cash flow generated from the branded products and services rather than equivalent non-branded ones. As a result, brand equity is defined differently, depending on the perspective of researchers.
Secondly, as commented by Yoshida and Gorden (2012), the moderating effects of relevant variables on brand equity are limited and inconclusive. The scholars from the contingency perspective (Evanschitzky & Wunderlich, 2006; Hariharan et al., 2018; Le et al., 2018; Seiders et al., 2005) argued that the influences of brand equity on the consequential outcomes (such as brand preference, purchase intention, and WOM) should be contingent upon certain moderating variables (such as relational variable and psychological variables). As brand-related research becomes abundant, more and more scholars have tried to investigate the potential moderating effects of consumer variables on consumer behaviors, especially in the relationships between satisfaction and behavior loyalty (Lee and Ferreira, 2011; Raimondo et al., 2008; Yoshida and Gordon, 2012). Two types of special but consequential moderators were concluded in the study that can enhance the satisfaction-behavioral intention links, which are psychological characteristics and relational characteristics. In terms of psychological characteristics, previous studies identified involvement (Seiders et al., 2005), commitment (Ahluwalia, Burnkrant, & Unnava, 2000) and brand love (Carroll & Ahuvia, 2006) as the potential factors to moderate the satisfaction-loyalty link. In terms of relational factors, previous studies, identified loyalty program participation (Evanschitzky & Wundderlich, 2006), and relationship age (Raimondo et al., 2008) as the critical moderators to this satisfaction-loyalty link.