Diagnosing service brand strength: customer-dominant brand relationship mapping

Abstract

Purpose

Managing service brands entails managing a portfolio of brand relationships with customers and non-customers. The paper develops a framework for diagnosing the strength of a service brand colored by a customer-dominant business logic perspective. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Design/methodology/approach

Combining insights from the literature on branding, service, and relationship management, the paper develops 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, the paper divides 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

The 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

The 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

The 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.

Citation

Martin Strandvik, T. and Heinonen, K. (2013), "Diagnosing service brand strength: customer-dominant brand relationship mapping", Journal of Service Management, Vol. 24 No. 5, pp. 502-519. https://doi.org/10.1108/JOSM-04-2013-0094