International Journal of Business and Management; Vol. 10, No. 10; 2015 ISSN 1833-3850 E-ISSN 1833-8119 Published by Canadian Center of Science and Education 26 A Behavioural Brand Evaluation Typology to Measure Brand Performance over Time Abas Mirzaei 1 , Helen (Elham) Siuki 1 , Chris Baumann 1 & David Gray 1 1 Macquarie University, Australia Correspondence: Abas Mirzaei, Macquarie University, Australia. E-mail: abas.mirzaei@mq.edu.au Received: July 13, 2015 Accepted: August 3, 2015 Online Published: September 18, 2015 doi:10.5539/ijbm.v10n10p26 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.5539/ijbm.v10n10p26 Abstract Brands are built over time, but are measured on short-term basis. This paper provides a new long-term based platform to evaluate the performance of a brand. It is built on a long-term brand health measure and monitors the performance of a brand over time. Depending on the extent to which a brand is healthy and powerful over time, a long-term oriented behavioural brand evaluation typology is developed which categorises brands into four types: Emergers, Strugglers, Dynamos, and Disoriented brands. This is a longitudinal study, examining the proposed typology in four service industries: banking, department stores, airlines, and insurance from 2001 to 2011. The findings suggest that Dynamos are the healthiest and most powerful brands, while Strugglers are the unhealthiest and least powerful brands. We provide practical strategies and actions to be taken for each type of brand. Keywords: brand equity, brand health index, marketing accountability, brand performance, branding 1. Introduction Over the last few years, brand managers have been under increasing pressure to objectively account for the contribution of their brand building actions. MSI (2000-2010) placed marketing accountability as one of its key research priorities, and a wide range of brand performance measures developed in response to this calls. Brand performance measures vary from subjective, survey-based measures, to objective and market-based, and financial measures. Subjective, survey-based measures are effective diagnostic tools for managers, however consumers’ ability in reflecting their preferences can influence the reliability of the results (Park & Srinivasan, 1994). Market-based, objective measures of brand performance, on the other hand, are based on consumer purchase behaviour, and less contingent to human errors in data collection, therefore more auditable and reliable. Moreover objective, behavioural measures are more relevant to senior managers (Kumar, Pozza, & Gonesh, 2013) since behavioural measures such as sales, and market share are associated with financial measures such as return which is the language of managers. Depending on the circumstances and the objectives, managers may apply different metrics to evaluate the brand performance, mostly, a combination of survey data, market figures, and financial results. Regardless of the type of performance measure being used, a major limitation of existing measures is their short-term orientation. Metrics that measure the performance of a brand based on short-term results, do not encompass the lagged impacts of marketing actions. It has been well-acknowledged in the literature that the results of brand building actions can go beyond the current term and appear in the future (Mizik & Jacobson 2007). Despite the fact that brands are built over time, brand performance is evaluated over short-term (Lodish & Mela, 2007). In other words, managers are hired to build brands over time, but they are fired on short-term basis (Bruce et al., 2012). Therefore it is important to be long-term oriented in order to evaluate the lagged outcome of branding actions. In this paper, we apply a new brand performance measure with long-term orientation, called “Brand Health Index”, proposed by Mirzaei et al. (2015), and provide a new framework that evaluates brands based on their long-term performance encompassing the lagged impacts. We propose a typology of behavioural brand evaluation (BBE) which enables managers to assess and monitor the health of their brands over time. We classify brands into four categories, namely, Dynamos, Strugglers, Emergers, and Disoriented brands. Throughout its life, a brand can face each of the above stages. We provide practical and effective marketing and brand building