A CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS OF BRAND LOYALTY AS CORE DIMENSION OF BRAND EQUITY

Nowadays, brands are companies’ most valuable assets, adding both economic and strategic value to its proprietors. During the last years, brand valuation has been an intensively analyzed subject among marketing specialists. The value of this asset is often referred to as brand equity which is the marketing and financial value associated with a brand’s strength in the market or the added value a given brand name provides to a product beyond the functional benefits. Besides the actual proprietary brand assets, such as patents and trademarks, other major elements underlie brand equity: brand awareness, perceived quality, brand associations and others, but, above all, brand loyalty, which represents the core of a brand’s value. This paper will try to position brand loyalty among other descriptive dimensions of brand equity, analyze the effects of a high degree of loyalty among customers, identify several typologies of customers considering their level of loyalty and finally establish a framework for creating, maintaining, enhancing, and assessing brand loyalty.