Malini Majumdar

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

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.