Developing an objective long-term oriented measure to monitor brand health

The main focus of this PhD study which is by publication is to provide a new platform to measure and monitor the performance of brand building efforts. This topic is important since it is in response to calls for improvements in marketing accountability and performance measurement. Moreover, it has been well argued that while brands are built over the long-term, they are judged on short-term basis. In response to this call, paper one conducts a comprehensive review of the existing brand performance measures in order to identify different categories of brand performance metrics (academic and industry), and their strengths and shortcomings. A need for objective long-term measures of brand performance was demonstrated. Focusing on major corporate brands, paper two develops an objective long-term oriented measure of brand health called Brand health Index (BHI). BHI is a function of sustained sales growth over the long-term. It enables managers to monitor and track the healthiness of their brands based on real time objective sales data. Extending the brand health index, I provide a behavioural brand evaluation typology, identifying four types of brands, Dynamos, Emergers, Strugglers, and Disoriented brands. Such a typology enables managers to first identify their brand's type and then apply more effective branding strategies accordingly. The advertising spending patterns, I call it advertising spending diet of healthy and unhealthy brands was also investigated in paper three. Applying a Kernel distribution estimation approach, I identified four different advertising spending diet, Smart, Double Hump, Early Quitting, and Poor. It was observed that healthy brands are on a Smart or Double Hump diet, as opposed to unhealthy brands which are on an early quitting or poor diet. The development of an advertising diet-brand health typology provided an opportunity to consider how effective advertising spending diets could improve brand health. Finally in paper four, the impact of brand health on customer equity was examined. Applying a macro model of customer equity, I demonstrated a positive impact of brand health on customer equity. Moreover, it was found that brand health can facilitate the impact of advertising spending on customer equity. In other words brand health has a mediating impact on advertising-customer equity relationship. Overall in this thesis longitudinal studies were conducted. Four industries were studied in this thesis including airlines, banking, department stores and insurance in the US market from 2000 to 2012 encompassing pre- and post-GFC to show how the new measures could be applied. The main contribution of this thesis is developing a new objective long-term based measure of brand health which is positively associated with short-term financial measures, ROA and EPS. On the one hand, it fulfils senior finance managers' needs since it's a behavioural measure based on consumer purchase behaviour. On the other hand , it fulfils the the brand managers' needs to have a behavioural measure that captures the lagged impact of marketing actions.