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Assessing the corporate brand: The Unique Corporate Association Valence (UCAV) approach

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Abstract

The article introduces a new approach for assessing corporate associations, the Unique Corporate Association Valence (UCAV) measure. The UCAV integrates the quantitative and qualitative approaches with the specific intent of capturing the advantages while avoiding some of the disadvantages of either approach. The initial qualitative and quantitative assessments of the Unique Corporate Association Valence (UCAV) measure support its usefulness as a measure of what people know about companies.

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  • For all multi-item scales, we calculated the mean across items. To handle item nonresponse, on the company image rating scale, we required that half of the items be present; for company familiarity and behavioural intentions, we only required that a single item be present to calculate the mean so that we could use as many cases as possible in the analysis.

  • The specific companies included Bridgestone/Firestone Inc., The Coca-Cola Company, Exxon Mobil Corporation, The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company, Intel Corporation, Microsoft Corporation, Pepsi-Cola Company, Philip Morris Companies Inc., RJ Reynolds Tobacco Holdings Inc., Sony Corporation, Texaco Inc., and Yamaha Corporation.

  • This includes 26 cases for which respondents provided the open-ended UCAV measure and the rating scale measure, but failed to provide evaluations on the open-ended thoughts. To use these cases, we read the responses provided in each box of the measure and then assigned the evaluative score (negative, neutral, positive). An analysis comparing the UCAV evaluation measure for the 137 cases evaluated by the respondents themselves versus the 26 cases for which we provided the evaluation produced no differences across the groups (F 1, 161=0.00; P>0.90). We take this as evidence for including the additional 26 cases and have done so for the remaining analyses.

  • If we eliminate the 26 cases for which we provided the evaluations based on our assessment of the thoughts provided by the respondents there is a main effect for the global evaluation question (88 per cent evaluative) versus the condition without the evaluation prime (78 percent; F1,136=5.15; P<0.05).

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  • Sample size has decreased for this analysis because we can only use cases that provided both product and company thoughts on the UCAV measure. As individuals were providing unique corporate associations, not everyone provided both types.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Marketing and Logistics, College of Business Administration, University of North Texas, Denton, 76203-1396, Texas

    Nancy Spears, Tom J Brown & Peter A Dacin

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  1. Nancy Spears
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  2. Tom J Brown
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  3. Peter A Dacin
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Correspondence to Nancy Spears.

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Spears, N., Brown, T. & Dacin, P. Assessing the corporate brand: The Unique Corporate Association Valence (UCAV) approach. J Brand Manag 14, 5–19 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.bm.2550051

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