Assessment of Brand Equity Building in the Business-to-Business Context: A Case Study on Ethiopian Freight Forwarding Companies
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Date
2015-07
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
This researcher tried to see the gap in the literature of brand equity that the CBBE model received in the business to business sector. The applicability of the CBBE model in the B2B area in Ethiopia by taking freight forwarding companies as product stimuli was analyzed. A quantitative research was applied to research the causal relationship of the brand equity antecedents to that of overall brand equity. A simple random sampling technique was conducted to contact the unit of analysis who are the logistics department officers and managers of the importing and exporting companies in Ethiopia. Applying a structured questionnaire written in English and Amharic the researcher distributed to 500 peoples personally and through email. Using Microsoft excel, AMOS and SPSS the collected data were analyzed and interpreted. A structural equation modeling was applied due to the latent construct nature of the model used. The finding shows that CBBE model can be applied in the business to business sector as well. Brand awareness, brand association, perceived quality and brand loyalty were found to be positively affecting brand equity as they were hypothesized. Companies in this logistics industry were found be ignorant of their brand status in the society or the brand awareness was found to be very low. Even if the perceived quality of the forwarding companies was low customers were found to be loyal. And brand loyalty was the strongest predictor in the path. As a result, companies must work on advertisement to increase awareness in the market and also must increase their professionalism to boost the perception of their customers about their quality service positively. Students or academicians in this area can take a study of this model by analyzing a hierarchical level study. Future research can be made starting from a grounded theory to find if other antecedents could explain the brand equity in Ethiopia in the Business to Business sector
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Band association, brand awareness, brand equity