The Development of Brand Association Measures in Multiple Product Categories: New Findings and Implications for Goods and Service Brands

Being able to determine the equity of a service or goods brand is of paramount importance to marketing practitioners and scholars alike. One way to determine the equity of a brand is through the measurement of brand associations. Few studies have constructed brand association measures in the context of either goods or service brands and most have been constructed to measure traditional goods brands. As Vargo and Lusch (2004) have indicated, the characteristics of a good differ greatly from those of a service. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to construct a separate brand association measure for the services and goods contexts. This study employed a mixed methods approach to generating and empirically testing brand association measures in both contexts. Thought-listing procedures with a sample of consumers (n=72) were utilized to generate survey items for the service-based brand associations measure. To test the psychometric properties of the brand association measure, a sample of service consumers (n=459) was utilized. Factor analysis procedures via MPlus 3.1 were utilized to examine the dimensionality of the service-based as well as the goods-based brand association measures. The result of this study was the construction of brand association measures that can be utilized in the goods or services contexts. It represents one of the first attempts to construct and compare brand association measures in both the goods and services contexts. Goods and services marketers can utilize these measures to determine how their consumers view their brand and they can track the success of their positioning efforts.