A Simple Walkthrough on How to Build Brand Equity

Brand equity is the value that your brand brings to the company. What a consumer believes, thinks, knows, and infers about a brand is critical to building brand equity. If you’re looking to increase the value of your brand, you’ll want to become familiar with the Keller brand equity model. Below, we cover the four elements of the model and discuss how you can use each one to build brand equity.

Brand Identity
This portion of the pyramid revolves around salience, or brand awareness. To start, ask yourself, “Does our brand stand out? Can customers easily recognize it?” To establish this foundation, you’ll first need to define your target market. Take time to divide this group into market segments, which will make it easier for you to perform research and determine how certain consumers see your brand.

Remember that you’re not just creating awareness—you also want to make sure that the perceptions of your brand throughout the buying process meets your requirements. Your goal here is to become confident in your understanding of consumer perception.

Brand Meaning
The next move on the Keller model is to identify and communicate what your brand means and stands for. This process can be broken into two sections: performance and imagery.

Performance is how well your product/service meets customer needs. This component is made up of five separate categories: primary features, product durability, service effectiveness, efficiency, and design. Review each of these and (if need be) adjust them to meet your goals.

Imagery is how well your brand meets customers’ psychological needs. You could be meeting these needs directly based on consumers’ own experiences with your product/service, or indirectly through word of mouth and other marketing efforts.

To enhance brand meaning, you need to ensure that your product/service is meeting and exceeding consumer expectations, and that the customer experience is pleasant. Look at it as forming your brand’s personality. When meeting a new person, your interactions with them create an initial feeling of liking or disliking—the same goes for your brand.

Brand Response
Similar to brand meaning, the brand response section is comprised of two sections: judgements and feelings. Your customers will constantly judge your brand based on factors like quality, credibility, consideration, and superiority. It’s important to stay on top of things like quality control and customer service to make sure that you don’t lose customers to your competitors.

As for feelings, brands can evoke emotions from consumers. Customers will reflect on how your brand makes them feel about themselves. The positive, brand-building feelings you want to strive for are warmth, fun, excitement, security, social approval, and self-respect. Determine which of these your current marketing strategy and campaigns focuses on, or, if necessary, what you can do to start cultivating them.

Brand Relationships
At the top of the pyramid, the focus is on brand resonance. This is the most desirable level to reach, but it’s challenging to get there. You’ve conquered this level when your customers have a deep bond with your brand. This includes loyalty, attitude, community, and engagement. You’ll want to strengthen all four of these factors to achieve ultimate marketing success. At this point, your consumers are making regular purchases and are engaging with your brand outside of the buying process.

Use this guide and the Keller model as a roadmap to build brand equity. Strengthen your company’s brand with these brand equity building blocks.