Why not let the agency decide the advertising?

D Vakratsas and Tim Ambler

Argues that marketing companies must get to grips with the theory and measurement of brand equity. Summarises the findings of a literature review conducted by the authors, leading to five conclusions: experience, feelings and beliefs are the key intermediate effects; short-term advertising elasticities are small; advertising returns diminish fast in mature frequently purchased markets; the concept of a hierarchy of effects is not supported; cognitive bias interferes with the measurement of feelings, which distorts advertising.

How to manage brand equity

Tim Ambler and Demetrios Vakratsas

This article forms part of a Market Leader feature on brand equity. For an introduction to the feature, click here.

Modern marketers are awash with data and that does not make it any easier to focus on the key measures of performance - 'metrics' in some people's language. Some metrics measure the asset that the marketer is building. Some call that 'reputation' but more marketers call it 'brand equity' than anything else. The term emerged in the 1980s but there has been a...

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