Keller's Brand Equity Model
Keller's Brand Equity Model builds a brand in four stages from the ground up - salience, then performance and imagery, then judgements and feelings, then resonance - because a customer cannot feel loyalty to a brand they barely notice.
A four-level pyramid narrows from broad awareness at its base up to resonance at the peak.
Reach for this when…
- You are pouring money into loyalty campaigns but awareness is still thin.
- Customers know the brand but cannot say what it stands for.
- You want to know which level of the brand actually needs the next investment.
How to run it
- Salience: make sure the right customers notice and recall you in the right situations.
- Performance: prove the product genuinely does the job.
- Imagery: build the associations - who uses it, where, why.
- Judgements and feelings: earn a considered opinion and an emotional response.
- Resonance: turn that into active loyalty, where the customer chooses you without checking.
A worked example
Situation. Tan Mei Ling ran Penang Fresh, a food and drink brand in Penang, Malaysia, that had decent recognition but customers switched to whatever was cheapest that week.
Applied. Working up the pyramid, she found salience and performance were fine but judgements and feelings were thin - nobody had a real opinion of the brand beyond "fine". She built a campaign around where the produce came from, giving customers something to actually feel.
Result. Switching dropped in the following quarter as a segment of customers started asking for Penang Fresh by name at the till instead of picking whatever was on offer.
The catch
The model is a ladder, and it is tempting to chase resonance before salience and performance are solid, which just produces an emotional campaign nobody notices. It also treats the customer as roughly one journey, when B2B or highly segmented markets often need a different ladder per segment. Measuring the top two levels well requires research most companies skip in favour of easier awareness metrics.
Resonance built on weak performance collapses the first time the product disappoints.
Origin: Kevin Lane Keller