Essays on Customer-Based Brand Equity

This dissertation presents two essays on customer-based brand equity, with Panel Vector Autoregression (PVAR) models as the main method of investigation, applied to brand health data tracking 1,033 brands from 35 sectors over six years. Essay 1 shows how a stronger customer-based brand equity makes companies more attractive to job seekers. Its first study shows not all elements of customer-based brand equity are equal in driving employer brand equity. Being perceived as a quality brand helps more than being perceived as a value brand. Advertising is less effective than positive buzz. A second study measured the willingness of almost 1,000 survey respondents to make tradeoffs between employer brand equity and salary. Results suggest job seekers would accept significantly lower salaries to work for a more attractive brand. Essay 2 presents empirical regularities about positive-negative asymmetries in brand metrics. Marketers frequently use net scores without accounting for differences in weights between the positive and negative sides of a metric. But should we use such net scores? Patterns from two studies indicate we should weigh positive and negative ratings differently. The impact of changes on the positive side of brand metrics is stronger than the impact of changes on the negative side. The pattern is valid for changes in quality, value, and buzz and for their impact on purchase consideration and purchase intent. Another pattern is that, for quality and value, the inertia of the positive side is higher than the inertia of the negative side. For buzz, the pattern depends on the rank: the inertia of the positive side (compared to the inertia of the negative side) is higher for lower-ranked brands but lower for higher-ranked brands. Thus, we should consider positive-negative asymmetries in brand metrics to avoid bias when estimating their effects.