A brand customer centricity calculator-An empirical approach to customer-centric branding

As brand positioning gains momentum as a vital marketing function, it becomes vital for organizations to recognize the consumer as a significant dimension in evaluating organizational brands. This can be achieved through adoption of appropriate brand management strategies. This paper attempts to investigate the essential attributes of a brand, and their relative importance in the context of brand positioning, from a consumer perspective. As organizations strive to add value to their respective brands, it is important to map the brand attributes, so that individual investigations of the respective attributes can help the organization in well directed marketing resource allocation. Brand positioning requires a frame of reference, and the consumer perception and ability to associate with distinctive brand attributes is a vital dimension in this context. Creating a well defined brand positioning will be a function of a set of determinants, which can be defined once the consumer's mind space is explored to identify the areas which make a consumer perceive greater value in a brand. For the purpose of the same, the brand attributes were compiled by a detailed study of academic and corporate literature available in the domain of branding. An evaluation grid comprising 55 brand attributes was developed as a research instrument to link consumer perception of the brand attributes with the functions performed by the same with respect to a brand. The respondents were required to map the individual brand attributes against one function performed by the attribute with respect to the brand. The primary outcome indicates that brands can benefit substantially from being customer centric and attempts to identify attributes which define greater Brand Customer centricity. The study further progresses to develop a Brand Customer Centricity calculator.