Measuring Customer Based Brand Equity: Evidence from the Ethiopian Bottled Water Market
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Date
2015-06
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
The study examines the applicability of a customer based brand equity model in the
Ethiopian Bottled water market. Based on Aaker’s well known conceptual framework of
brand equity and extended by Yoo & Donthu (2001), this study employed structural equation
modeling to investigate the causal relationships among the three dimensions of brand equity
and overall brand equity in the Ethiopian bottled water industry. The study used the
multidimensional brand equity scale and overall brand equity scale developed and validated
by Yoo and Donthu (2001). The sample size of the study was 400 actual consumers of bottled
water selected using a judgmental sampling method from Addis Ababa. The sample size was
decided based on sample sizes used in similar previous researches and other considerations
such as resource constraints. The findings of the study concluded that brand awareness and
Perceived Quality are influential dimensions of brand equity in the Ethiopian bottled water
market. However, the influence of brand loyalty was found to be insignificant which is in
contradiction with both previous studies and the underlying brand equity theory that asserts
brand loyalty to be the core component of brand equity. The study showed that marketing
managers working in the Ethiopian bottled water industry should concentrate their efforts
primarily on creating adequate awareness about their product emphasizing on enhancing the
consumers perception about the quality of that particular bottled water product. This study
contributes to the limited literature in testing the applicability of consumer-based brand
equity model and measurement scale in the Ethiopian market, particularly in the bottled
water industry. Future research needed to be done if the results are to be expanded into
other more branded product categories given the product used in the current study is a pure
commodity and infancy of the industry may not explain the brand equity model as adequately
as expected
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Keywords
brand equity, water market, Ethiopian bottled water industry