The role of consumer-brand experiences and relationship in contributing to brand equity for services

Branding today is conceived as a co-creation process during which brand equity is created through interactions among the stakeholders and personalized consumer experience is an important branding practice for value creation and differentiation from competitors. Consumer-brand relationship has been proposed as a metaphor to connect relationship marketing activities and brand equity. However, little research has been conducted to examine how experiences with a brand affect brand equity via the consumer-brand relationship, especially in a service context. This research aims at developing a conceptual model to depict the structural relationships among brand experiences, consumer-brand relationship and brand equity. The model was tested against a student sample and received reasonable support. The utilitarian brand relationships, as different from a number of previous studies, contribute more to brand equity than affective brand relationships. Marketing implications, research limitations and future research directions are discussed at the end of the paper.