USING BRAND CONCEPT MAPPING AND NETWORK ANALYSIS TO STUDY BRANDS

The study of brands has always been an important and exciting area both in marketing academia and practice. The Customer-Based Brand Equity (CBBE) model, which was developed by the father of modern brand management Kevin Lane Keller (1993), still guides marketers how to build, measure, and manage brand equity (Keller, 2016). The basic premise of the CBBE model is that brand knowledge stored in consumer memory determine brand equity and the effectiveness of future branding strategies. That is, brand knowledge is a key concept for the brand equity model, and it is essential for managers and researchers to develop insights on consumers’ brand knowledge stored in memory. Brand knowledge is conceptualized as an associative network in which a focal brand node is connected to other informational nodes (i.e., brand associations) in memory. Therefore, the elicitation and examination of brand associations networks are key initial stages in understanding brand equity (Keller, 2001, 2003, 2009, 2016). Further, there have been efforts to propose methodological approaches to elicit and examine brand knowledge (Böger, Kottemann, Meißner, & Decker, 2017; John, Loken, Kim, & Monga, 2006; Schnittka, Sattler, & Zenker, 2012) and calls for new methodological approaches in terms of tools and models for creating mental maps to identify and examine brand knowledge structures stored in consumer memory (John, 2016; Keller, 2003, 2016). Accordingly, in this dissertation, I focus on proposing theoretically driven and analytics oriented fresh perspectives to the study of brand knowledge stored in memory