Customers create and establish feelings and thoughts regarding your brand with every experience they have with it. These can be negative or positive. Keller’s Brand Equity Model is all about taking control of what those feelings and thoughts are. You need to shape the experiences to create the desired thoughts and feelings about your brand. Controlling these parts of your brand creates strong Brand Equity. Strong Brand Equity will mean more people will buy from you. So here we go, how can you improve your brand?
Keller’s Brand Equity Model Steps
1. Brand Identity – Who are you?
Identifying who you will help you to stand out for customers to recognize you and be aware of you. But remember, awareness is not always a good thing. You need to make sure the perceptions that people have are the desired ones. This is an important part of establishing who you are and what your brand identity is. So how do you do this? Research your market to understand who your customers are, identify how they decide between your brand and another brand, what decision-making process they go through, and find out how well your brand stands out during this process that they go through.
2. Brand Meaning – What are you?
What does your brand mean and what does it stand for? There are two areas to focus in. Performance and Imagery. How does your product perform? Does it meet your customer’s needs? What are the main features and characteristics? Imagery is thinking about how you meet your customer’s needs on a social and psychological level.
3. Brand Response – What do I think, or feel, about you?
Your customers’ responses are important for this step. Find out how they are responding. They will respond in two areas: Judgement and Feelings. People are always making judgments in these categories: Quality, Credibility, Consideration, and Superiority. Brands also make people have feelings, both about the brand and about themselves when they interact with the brand. Finding these out can help you to move forward to understand what you can do to improve the positive feelings and judgments that customers are making about your brand. How do you compare to other brands? How can you beat them? Identifying one of the positive feelings your brand portrays and using that to your advantage is key.
4. Brand Resonance – How much of a connection would I like
to have with you?
Welcome to the most difficult step. The highest level. Where everyone wants to get to. Your brand resonates with your customers when they feel a deep and psychological bond with your brand. Four things happen when you achieve this. Customers are loyal repeat purchasers, they love your brand and see it as a special purchase, they feel like they are a part of a community with other customers, they are actively engaging with your brand without even purchasing it. How can you do this you ask? Focus on each category one by one and identify what specific things you can do to increase the customers in the category and their strength. Make a list of ACTIONS you can take to help these categories.
You should now be ready to fill in your own brand equity model! Download the printable below. Want an example of Keller’s Brand Equity Model in action, check out this link.
By: Giuliana Bonaldo, Jeffrey Fortner, Jordan Kohler