ارتباط مارکتینگ میکس و برابری برند خرده فروشان ادراک شده The Relationship between Marketing Mix and Retailer-Perceived Brand Equity

Introduction Brand is one of the most important company assets which plays an important role to improve the lives of consumers and also contributes to the financial equity of the firm (Kotler & Keller, 2006). A stronger brand is the primary source of competitive advantage which ultimately generates revenue to enhance the liquidity of the firm (Baldauf et al., 2003). Therefore, companies must continue to build and enhance brand equity for their products to ensure longevity of success for the firm in the long term. In marketing the products, producers commonly sell their goods through full channel – via retailers and wholesalers. In this regard, the retailer’s decision to sell a particular brand determines the success of the manufacturer especially in the consumer goods category (Bloom & Perry, 2001). Retailers generally sell goods that have value or profit for them in return and are demanded by the customers. For these reasons, brand equity is important not only as measured from the consumer’s perspective, but also from the retailers’ perspective; an important field which has been largely ignored and scarcely investigated so far (Samu et al., 2012). While the industry is notably paying a closer attention to the applicability and significance of branding in a business-to-business (B2B) context, the academic interest on this subject is unfortunately still lacking (Lynch & de Chernatony, 2004; Herbst, et al., 2012; Koporcic & Törnroos, 2015). This is where we intend to make a meaningful contribution to the retail marketing knowledge – to analyse retailer-perceived brand equity with its dimensions in a developing country context of Indonesia. To this extent, there have been excellent studies published where marketing efforts are considered to have a positive impact on brand equity (Yoo et al., 2000; Kotler & Keller, 2006; Baldauf et al., 2009). In this research, marketing efforts are carried out in its traditional form, which is the marketing mix (i.e., product, place, price, and promotion), as a representative set of marketing activity which are related to brand equity (Yoo et al., 2000). Almost every marketing activity has a potential impact on brand equity because it represents the effect of marketing investment that has been accumulated into a brand. Furthermore, marketing decisions and marketing conditions also affect brand equity, such as advertising expenditures, sales force and marketing expenditure, the age of the brand, advertising shares, and portfolio of products as a source of brand equity (Simon & Sullivan, 1993). Other marketing activities such as the use of public relations, slogan or jingle, symbols, and packages (Aaker & Equity, 1991), company image, country of origin, and promotional events (Keller, 1993) also positively contribute to brand equity.