Customer Assessment of Brand Valuation and Social Media

The research problem engaged in this article is to determine whether contemporary consumers are able to assess brand equity in the overabundance of brands and products with similar features and qualities. The author argues that in the existing circumstances when differences between brands become insignificant the consumer is not capable of assessing their equity adequately. In order to verify the thesis the author has accepted the theoretical assumption, that social media creates brand value. Next examines the correlation between brand values and social media metrics with relation to the used brand equity methodology. Results point out to the existence of correlation between brand value and number of Facebook fans only in the case of valuation methodology which included experts in the brand equity assessment process. Thus, self-awareness of customers may be a key factor of the quality of their brand equity assessment. With reference to the author's thesis of this article the existing conditions of oversupply of brands, products and communications, differences between brands become insignificant, and as the result a consumer is not able to accurately assess their equity. Thus, the specific of today market environment conditions may be a satisfactory explanation why customer assessment of brand valuation fails. On the other hand, keeping in mind the fact that there is a big discrepancy between the brand capital declared by customers and their final purchasing decisions regarding a product of a particular brand, it could be helpful to better measure brand competitiveness level understood as a probability of choosing one brand of a given category over other brands of the same category. Developing and including such a factor into brand equity measurement could significantly improve brand value approximation based on customer assessment