The Truth About Brand Equity

Whatever the economic climate, measuring the effectiveness of your advertising campaign or the strength of your brand is a critical factor to business success. Drawing on over 20 years of advertising insight, Paul Feldwick's latest book, 'What is Brand Equity Anyway?' (published by WARC) is likely to be of interest to anyone concerned with brands, marketing and advertising.

Written in two parts that address the major themes of this work: brands and advertising, Feldwick leads the reader through a series of well thought essays which lead to the heart of the adman's raison d'être. 'Advertising is an expensive business. Those who spend money on it should want to know what results they're getting. And those who plan and create it should want to find out if what they're doing is working ... in order to do it better next time.'

The book aims to strip away the layers of myth and confusion surrounding the concepts of 'brands' and 'advertising' to pose some fundamental questions. Written by one of marketing's most respected commentators, it will allow readers to reassess their understanding of what brands are and how they are researched.

Among the topics Paul Feldwick investigates are:

• What is a brand and what is 'brand equity'?
  
• What makes a brand strong or an ad campaign successful? Are the answers in a value on the balance sheet or consumer demand for the product? Or are they in the network of associations surrounding the brand?
  
• Is there a 'right way' of pre-testing advertising? How far can advertisers expect to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns in the marketplace? What are the politics of advertising evaluation?
  
• Should advertising be considered as a science or an art?

In the first part of the book, Paul sets out to clear much of the confusion surrounding the often-used (and abused) term 'brand equity' - uncovering three fundamentally different meanings of the phrase - before constructing a practical review of brand research techniques. The second section turns to the measurement of advertising strength, whilst the book concludes by examining the different ways in which practitioners and researchers have thought about advertising, investigating a debate that has been raging for at least a century.

Today Paul Feldwick is Executive Planning Director at BMP DDB, and a Worldwide Brand Planning Director for DDB. He was convenor of judges for the IPA Advertising Effectiveness Awards from 1988 to 1990, also writing award-winning papers in 1984 and 1996. He has been Chairman of the Association for Qualitative Research and of the Account Planning Group, and is a Fellow of the IPA and the Market Research Society.

All articles 2006-22 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas unless otherwise stated.

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