Understanding What's in a Brand Rating: A Model for Assessing Brand and Attribute Effects and Their Relationship to Brand Equity

Although brand ratings capture the favorability of brand associations, they often do not enable marketing managers to disentangle brand-specific associations from other effects. In this article, the authors present a decompositional model for analyzing brand ratings that addresses this nagging problem and provide insights for understanding the sources of brand equity. Starting with consumers' perceived level of a brand on an attribute, the authors decompose the rating into two components: brand-specific associations and general brand impressions. Brand-specific associations refer to features, attributes, or benefits that consumers link to a brand and that differentiate it from the competition. General brand impressions refer to general impressions about the brand that are based on a more holistic view of the brand. In this article, the authors focus on two principal issues: (1) How can the sources of bias that may be present in brand ratings be disentangled? and (2) Do these putatively biasing effects, if present, have any managerial implications for brand equity? The authors demonstrate the properties and advantages of the model in the context of three empirical applications.