Development and validation of an airline-specific customer-based brand equity scale

A brand is a feature that distinguishes one product or service from another. Having a strong brand can therefore provide competitive advantages to airlines which is key in today’s highly competitive environment to achieve sustainable growth and profit. One of the critical aspects of strategic brand management is the assessment of the health of the brand. Therefore, the brand equity concept introduced the 1980s that, in general represents added value derived from customer perceptions of the brand versus the product/service itself, enables researchers and marketers to evaluate and understand brand successes and failures. However, there is little agreement in the literature on the concept, its measurement or its key dimensions. Having reliable measures is one of the prerequisites in management since it is difficult to manage something without measuring it appropriately. Therefore, the aim of this study is to systematically develop a valid, reliable and parsimonious scale to measure customer-based brand equity of airlines. Following well-established scale development procedures, this study first adopts a range of qualitative studies to construct an airline-specific customer-based brand equity scale. The scale construction established through a review of literature, airline marketing expert interviews, and a data-mining study on passenger reviews. The construction is followed by stepwise passenger surveys to test, validate and to assess its reliability. The results support the validity, reliability and the scale’s predictive capability. Therefore, the result revealed six main dimensions of the ACBBE (Airline Customerbased Brand Equity) scale namely: awareness, service performance (functional and technical performance), credibility, differentiation, value and loyalty (brand intention and brand premium). This study provides a diagnostic tool for the airline marketing professionals to track, audit and assess the performance and health of their brands. The academic contribution of this research is twofold. It introduces a valid, reliable and psychometrically robust measurement tool by considering dynamics of the industry and, therefore, this study may lead as a point of departure to develop more sophisticated airline brand equity valuation methods.