Brands, Brand Equity, and Cultural Equity

At a basic level, a brand is a name, protected through a registered trademark, used to identify a company’s products/services. At a higher level, brands are associations in consumers’ minds that can be used to fulfill a variety of personal and collective goals. Brands that distinctively succeed at fulfilling consumers’ goals are said to have equity, or the distinctive types of brand knowledge that trigger favorable consumers’ responses to the marketing of the brand. When the brand knowledge is of a cultural nature (i.e., the brand’s meaning as a cultural symbol), we say that the brand has cultural equity.