Brands and Branding: Research Findings and Future Priorities

TLDR

Branding has become a top management priority as firms recognize brands as highly valuable intangible assets, prompting extensive academic inquiry into brand‑related topics. This paper surveys influential academic work on brand positioning, integration, equity measurement, growth, and management, and identifies research gaps and proposes related questions. The authors discuss choice‑modeling implications of branding, addressing challenges of incorporating main and interaction effects and the influence of competition.

Abstract

Branding has emerged as a top management priority in the last decade due to the growing realization that brands are one of the most valuable intangible assets that firms have. Driven in part by this intense industry interest, academic researchers have explored a number of different brand-related topics in recent years, generating scores of papers, articles, research reports, and books. This paper identifies some of the influential work in the branding area, highlighting what has been learned from an academic perspective on important topics such as brand positioning, brand integration, brand-equity measurement, brand growth, and brand management. The paper also outlines some gaps that exist in the research of branding and brand equity and formulates a series of related research questions. Choice modeling implications of the branding concept and the challenges of incorporating main and interaction effects of branding as well as the impact of competition are discussed.