Assessing brand image through communalities and asymmetries in brand-to-attribute and attribute-to-brand associations

Brand image is a key component of customer-based brand equity, and refers to the associations a consumer holds in memory. Such associations are often directional; one should distinguish between brand-to-attribute and attribute-to-brand associations. Information on these associations arise from two ways of collecting data, respectively: brand-by-brand evaluations of all attributes and attribute-by-attributes evaluations of all brands. In this paper, the authors present a methodological approach, namely correspondence analysis of matched matrices, to assess the communalities as well as asymmetries between brand-to-attribute and attribute-to-brand associations. This allows studying whether or not there is match in a brand's positioning (brand-to-attribute associations) and relative advantage (attribute-to-brand associations). The methodology results in perceptual maps visualizing brand image. The approach is illustrated in an empirical market research project in which two samples of consumers evaluated ten brands of deodorants and eleven attributes. The stability of the solution is examined using bootstrap resampling procedures.