Diagnosing Service Brand Strength: Customer-Dominant Brand Relationship Mapping

Purpose – Managing service brands entails managing a portfolio of brand relationships with customers and non-customers. We develop a framework for diagnosing the strength of a service brand colored by a customer-dominant business logic perspective.
Design/methodology/approach – Combining insights from the literature on branding, service, and relationship management, we develop a customer-dominant conceptual and methodological approach. Brand strength captures customers’ attachment to a brand in terms of their thoughts, feelings, and actions toward the brand. Since brand strength is the configuration of customers’ and non-customers’ brand relationships, we divide the brand relationship into two components—brand connection and purchase status—to compose a brand strength map.
Findings – Grounded in customers’ accumulated positive and negative experiences, the framework creates a diagnostic picture of the strength of the brand, and an illustrative empirical study demonstrates the mapping procedure’s applicability to service brands.
Research limitations/implications – Our approach is an alternative to a traditional measurement scale development approach. Future studies should explore the framework’s adaptability to different contexts, stakeholders, and industries.
Practical implications – Our distinctive model comprehensively captures the aggregate picture of customers’ brand relationships, and the managerially parsimonious framework can be adapted to different service settings.
Originality/value – Our framework represents a novel diagnostic tool for service companies to explore their brand’s strength. The approach is unique because it adopts a customer-dominant perspective. Furthermore, it includes behavior with a relational perspective and negative responses, which reduce overall brand strength.