Customer-based strategic brand management: past progress and future challenges

In his seminal Journal of Marketing article, entitled “Conceptualizing, Measuring, and Managing Customer-Based Brand Equity,” Kevin Keller argued persuasively that we can best understand, measure, and manage brands by understanding what consumers know about brands. In this commentary, I discuss the progress we have made in researching several areas of consumer branding, including measuring consumer brand knowledge and leveraging brands through brand extensions. Further, I identify challenges for future research in both areas, including needed developments in measuring brand association networks, researching global differences in consumer response to brand extensions, and understanding how contextual factors such as competitive environments affect brand extension success.