Holistic Consumer Evaluation of Retail Corporate Brands and Impact on Consumer Loyalty Intentions

Abstract

We offer a holistic framework of consumer evaluation of retail corporate brands called perceived customer equity. Drawing upon the customer equity theory, we hypothesize that perceived customer equity is a higher-order consumer evaluation that is measured via brand equity, value equity and relationship equity. A major theoretical contribution of our study is that we offer a novel holistic (versus an atomistic) perspective to retail corporate brands. Additionally, consistent conceptualization as well as operationalization of perceived customer equity overcomes limitations in image-based measures that tend to rely on idiosyncratic approaches to capturing consumer perceptions. We offer a novel mindset to managing retail corporate brands. Our analysis, conducted using a consumer survey, supports our conceptualization of perceived customer equity as a second-order construct. Moreover, we observe that perceived customer equity significantly explains consumer loyalty intentions, and explains greater variance in the outcome relative to that achieved jointly by the three dimensions.