Firms exhibit or "manifest" three types of branding strategies: corporate branding, house of brands, or mixed branding. These strategies differ in their essential structure and in their potential costs and benefits to the firm. Prior research has failed to understand how these branding strategies are related to the intangible value of the firm. The authors investigate this relationship using five-year data for a sample of 113 U.S. firms. They find that corporate branding strategy is associated with higher values of Tobin's q, and mixed branding strategy is associated with lower values of Tobin's q, after controlling for the effects of several important and relevant factors. The relationships of the control variables are consistent with prior expectations. In addition, most of the firms would have been able to improve their Tobin's q had they adopted a branding strategy different from the one their brand portfolios revealed. The authors also discuss implications and future research directions.

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Customer equity and brand equity are two of the most important topics to academic researchers and practitioners. As part of the 2005 Thought Leaders Conference held at the University of Connecticut, the authors were asked to review what was known and not known about the relationship between brand equity and customer equity. During their discussions, it became clear that whereas two distinct research streams have emerged and there are distinct differences, the concepts are also highly related. It also became clear that whereas the focus of both brand equity and customer equity research has been on the end consumer, there is a need for research to understand the intermediary’s perspective (e.g., the value of the brand to the retailer and the value of a customer to a retailer) and the consumer’s perspective (e.g., the value of the brand versus the value of the retailer). This article represents general conclusions from the authors’ discussion and suggests a modeling approach that could be used to investigate linkages between brand equity and customer equity as well as a modeling approach to determine the value of the manufacturer to a retailer.

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Conjoint measurement is a new development in mathematical psychology that can be used to measure the joint effects of a set of independent variables on the ordering of a dependent variable. In this (primarily expository) article, the techniques are applied to illustrative problems in marketing. In addition, a number of possible areas of application to marketing research are discussed, as well as some of the methodology's limitations.

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