Customer-Based Brand Equity Theory

positive customer attitude toward a brand, and how capitalize on attitudes and loyalties of their customers. In terms of Customer Based Brand Equity, congruence between brand identity and brand image is very important to companies or organizations. It plays an influential role in brand image forming in target consumers’ mind. In Customer-based Brand Equity theory, Kevin Lane Keller demonstrates that there are 4 steps to build a strong brand. At the beginning, both proper brand identity and appropriate brand image is the fundamental works for building a powerful brand. Only achieving these first 2 steps may a company continue to climb upper on this pyramid.

“Building a strong brand involves four steps: (1) establishing the proper brand identity,

A company has to build the right type of experiences around brand, to manage touch points and moment of truth, so that customers can have positive thoughts, specific feelings, relative association, and matching perceptions as company hopes and plans. After brand salience has been realized, the process moves on to the development of brand meaning. To boost overall brand equity requires paying attention to brand meaning, which is related to both brand performance and brand imagery. Raising brand performance starts by delivering products or services that can meet current consumer needs. A good product is at the heart of brand equity and it is the primary influence of consumer experience with a brand. However, to build a powerful and leading brand, only a good product performance is not enough. Company should be attentive to its brand imagery and watch out what people think about a brand in terms of values and meaning. Brand imagery, it is not so much about what exactly the product can bring in terms of functionality. That is to say the brand imagery attempts to meet consumers’ psychological or social needs. When people choose a brand, they consider how they feel about the image in their mind and how other people think about them when they are one of the brand users. In the end, these two dimensions bring about certain brand associations

Backing to one of the problems that Decathlon China faces is that the core target consumers have a low sensitivity to this brand. It is true that Decathlon China has numerous consumers coming into store for shopping sports goods each day, however the core target consumers still have low sensitivity to its name when they need sports goods. For Decathlon China, the core target consumers are the people at 15 years old to 35 years old who are enthusiasm in outdoor activities and sports, or who doing sports regularly, or at least the beginners who have thought in doing sports, but in fact, the main actual Chinese Decathlon consumers are in their middle adulthood at ages 40 to 50 years old, and most of them are non-sportive. These people decide to buy Decathlon products anyway because it is cheap. They hardly pay attention to the function difference in flavor and have no interest in exploring and buying top range products. In addition, Decathlon rarely launches publicity to inform consumers about the advantage of its top and innovative products. While generally speaking, Decathlon puts high value on lowering production cost so that it hardly launches commercial advertising on TV, selects celebrities as brand ambassadors, publishes articles in magazines, or sponsors worldwide sports activities,