Objective: Customer-based brand equity, as the most important brand asset, ultimately leads to customer purchase intention, market share, and brand competitive advantage. One of the problems in measuring this construct is the large number of questions. For this purpose, the overall brand equity construct with fewer questions has been proposed in this study. The aim of the present study is to evaluate the relationship between the four dimensions of customer-based brand equity and overall brand equity and to study the moderating role of product nature (goods and services) and sample composition (student or mixed) on the aforementioned relationships.
Method: The method of the present study was meta-analysis. Initially, 79 studies were selected based on the title and abstract, and then by reading the full text, 37 were excluded from the study and 42 were included in the analysis. The two criteria for including studies in the meta-analysis were measuring overall brand equity and reporting direct or indirect correlation. CMA2 software was used to conduct the analyses.
Results: The findings showed that brand loyalty, perceived brand quality, brand links, and brand awareness have a positive relationship with overall brand equity. The relationship between brand awareness and overall brand equity in studies conducted on goods is no different from that in studies conducted in service industries. The findings showed that the correlation of brand awareness with overall brand equity is lower for studies whose samples only included students than for studies with a mixed sample. The nature of the product does not have a moderating effect on the relationship between brand links with overall brand equity, but the correlation of brand links with overall brand equity is lower for studies with a student sample than for studies with a mixed sample.
Conclusions: The findings showed that the type of sample composition (student, mixed) has a moderating effect on the relationship between all four factors constituting customer-based brand equity and overall brand equity. Also, the findings showed that the type of product does not have a moderating effect on the relationship between any of the four factors constituting customer-based brand equity and overall brand equity.