If you're so strong, why aren't you bigger?
Making the case against brand equity
Andrew S C Ehrenberg
Ideas about brand equity - that mystery quality which marks out muscular brands from flabby ones - have become something of a cottage industry. Thick books are written about it and companies change hands on the strength of it. But actually `equity' (along with the image scores that supposedly reveal it) is almost entirely dependent on a brand's size and market share. A simple theoretical model, the `Dirichlet', demonstrates this. Smaller brands with poor images suffer from `double jeopardy' - fewer people...