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Branding

The process of creating 

and evolving successful 

brands.

Brand

The sum of the 

characteristics of a 

product or service 

perceived by a user.

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Chapter 8  Digital marketing

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the promise of achievement – to assist consumers in achieving their goals, for example 

supporting online investors in their decision or supporting business people in their 

day-to-day work;

● 

the promise of fun and adventure – this is clearly more relevant for B2C services;

● 

the promise of  self-  expression  and  recognition – provided by personalisation services such 

as Yahoo! Geocities where consumers can build their own website;

● 

the promise of belonging – provided by online communities.

De Chernatony (2001) suggests successful online branding requires delivering three aspects 

of a brand: rational values, emotional values and promised experience (based on rational and 

emotional values).

An alternative perspective on branding is provided by Aaker and Joachimsthaler (2000) 

who refer to ‘

brand equity

’ which they define as:

a set of brand assets and liabilities linked to a brand, its name and symbol, that add to or sub-

tract from the value provided by a product or service to a firm and/or to that firm’s customers.

So, brand equity indicates the value provided to a company, or its customers, through a 

brand. Assessing brand equity on the web needs to address the unique characteristics of 

 computer-  mediated environments, as Christodoulides and de Chernatony (2004) have 

pointed out. These researchers set out to explore whether additional measures of brand 

equity were required online. Based on expert interviews they have identified the additional 

measures of brand equity which are important online, as summarised in Table 8.9. As we 

would expect, this includes attributes of the digital medium such as interactivity and cus-

tomisation which combine to form relevance and a great online