Thesis (M.Sc.) - Cairo University - Faculty of Commerce - Department of Business Administration

The research focuses on the state of marketing research and the lack of historical marketing research. While there have been some recent efforts to research and document the history of marketing, it has mainly focused on a specific kind of historical research that uses periodization and interpretation through qualitative techniques. The purpose of this study is to provide an example on an alternative to this method in which databases and other sources of data could be used as a way to build marketing history through quantitative techniques alongside the traditional qualitative techniques. Thus, the research provides and overview of the history of branding, from its earlier concepts and relationship to marketing, to its most recent incarnations. This research showed that branding has a very early history going back centuries, and that the concept has continued to evolve till recent years. However, some constructs of branding have begun to emerge that are still more of conceptual ideas rather than evidence-based models. This is then further confirmed by a quantitative meta-analysis which looked at the relationships between Brand Loyalty and between variables including Trust, Perceived Quality, Brand Awareness, Satisfaction, & Brand Equity. Each of these constructs showed moderate to strong relationships (r > 0.6) and being statistically significant. However, the very broad range of variables in more recent studies and models and with more modern concepts (e.g. Brand Personality) were not studied sufficiently to be aggregated and synthesized in a meta-analysis. This demonstrates the modern challenges facing the field of branding moving forward in terms of providing an empirical basis for such models and concepts being developed across a wide breadth in the field of branding

Issued also as CD