David A. Aaker

Consumer evaluations of brand extensions.

Two studies were conducted to obtain insights on how consumers form attitudes toward brand extensions, (i.e., use of an established brand name to enter a new product category). In one study, reacti...

MEASURING BRAND EQUITY ACROSS PRODUCTS AND MARKETS

This article presents managers with a framework for measuring the strength of a brand. It specifically examines ten sets of measures grouped into five categories: loyalty, perceived quality, associations, awareness, and market behavior. Employing these measures can be difficult and their results must be used carefully. However, they have the capacity to provide managers with a set of important and extremely useful measurement tools.

Warmth in Advertising: Measurement, Impact, and Sequence Effects

The impact of the feeling of warmth created by a commercial, as measured by the “warmth monitor,” is explored in a series of three studies. The first study examines the relationship between warmth and arousal as measured by skin response. The other studies explore the relationship between warmth and advertising responses such as liking of the ad and purchase likelihood through testing ads with warm and other execution strategies. They also test the effects of sequences of commercials on warmth responses and on the impact of the ad.

Leveraging the Corporate Brand

Brand assets are difficult and expensive to develop, maintain, and adapt. The offering environment is cluttered, confused, and complex in part because of the proliferation of products, brands, and sub-brands. Dynamic market contexts with the emergence of new sub-categories make it necessary to adapt and stretch brands, putting additional strain on their ability to deliver the needed support. In this context, the corporate brand (or, more generally, an organization brand) can be dialed up to play a more prominent role in the brand portfolio. The corporate brand defines the firm that will deliver and stand behind the offering that the customer will buy and use. The brand has access to organizational as well as product associations and the flexibility to play several roles within the brand portfolio. Of most significance is its potential in some contexts to be a master brand with a significant driver role. In fact, in the case of Dell, UPS, Sony, Samsung, IBM, and others, it can been seen as the ultimate branded house, where the product brands consist largely of the corporate brand plus a descriptor. In these cases, the use of a corporate brand as a master brand maximizes brand portfolio goals such as generating leverage, synergy, and clarity.

Managing Assets and Skills: The Key To a Sustainable Competitive Advantage

Long-term success involves creating, managing, and exploiting assets and skills that competitors find difficult to match or counter. This involves a three-step process. The first step is to identify relevant skills and assets by observing successful and unsuccessful firms, key customer motivations, large value-added items, and mobility barriers. The second step is to select those skills and assets that will provide an advantage over competitors, will be relevant to the market, and will be feasible, sustainable, and appropriate for the furture. The third step is to develop and maintain those assets and skills and to neutralize those of competitors.

THE VALUE RELEVANCE OF BRAND ATTITUDE IN HIGH TECHNOLOGY MARKETS

The authors assess the extent to which brand attitude, a key component of brand equity, has value relevance—that is, helps predict future earnings and thus firm value—in high-technology markets. Using data for firms in the computer industries, the authors find that changes in brand attitude are associated contemporaneously with stock return and lead accounting financial performance. The study also provides insights into the drivers of brand attitude. The authors find that both product attributes and peripheral cues shape brand attitudes in high-technology markets.

Are All the Effects of Ad-Induced Feelings Mediated by A(subscript)Ad?

Conditions under which attitudes toward the ad may not completely mediate the effect of feeling responses on persuasive communications are examined. The results suggest that for at least some types of ad executions, particularly those at relatively low exposure levels, ad attitudes did not mediate all of the effect of feeling response.

Myopic management behavior with efficient, but imperfect, financial markets: A comparison of information asymmetries in the U.S. and Japan☆

Abstract In order to gain insights into possible cross-national differences in asymmetric information between managers and investors, we empirically assess differences in timing between the U.S. and the Japanese stock markets in impounding accounting information. Our findings indicating that the Japanese stock market incorporates information earlier than does the U.S. stock market are consistent with the hypothesis that Japanese investors, who tend to have close ties to the businesses they invest in, are better informed than their U.S. counterparts. We suggest, building on Steins (1989) work on market signaling/jamming, that larger information asymmetries in the U.S. may be creating incentives for a short-run management style detrimental to long-term competitiveness.

Innovation: Brand It or Lose It

A brand strategy can be critical to the success of an innovation, particularly in the long term. There are times when a firm literally needs to brand an innovation or lose it. Without a successful branding strategy, an innovation can be short-lived—diffusing into a confused marketplace with its impact dissipated—or become another forgotten internal initiative. In such cases, branding can make all the difference. Branding, it should be emphasized, does not mean simply putting a name and logo on an innovation. Rather, it means making the brand an integral part of a coherent strategy, supported by actively managed and adequately funded brand-building programs. At the same time, not all innovations merit such a program and over-branding can pose business risks.

A model for the selection of interdependent R&D projects

The R&D project selection model provides for three types of project interrelationships: overlap in project resource utilization, technical project interdependence, and the project interaction with respect to value contribution. It also provides an input structure that should help diverse people in the organization communicate their knowledge and opinions to the R&D planning process.