Towards Customer Equity: should marketers shift focus from brand equity‪?‬

A strong brand, having high brand equity generates higher revenue for the company. Brand Equity, as evidenced, results from a strong mental association that the customer links with the brand. It can be considered as the sum of customers’ assessments of a brand’s intangible qualities. Therefore, it cannot be a true measure of the marketing efforts of a company, though it was perceived so long to be so. Customer Equity, of late, has been identified as a basis to build powerful customer-centric marketing programs, which are more effective in highly competitive business scenario. There are three drivers of customer equity—value equity, brand equity, and relationship equity. Today's turbulent business environment is in requirement of maximizing the value of a company's customer assets. This stresses further the importance of focusing on Customer Equity as a customer-centric approach, rather than on Brand Equity, basically a product-centered approach.