Publication Details
Abstract
Brand equity is usually measured once, in a survey, and related to marketing strategies across hotels. That design confuses what a strategy does with what kind of hotel adopts it. This article follows 72 hotels in Tashkent, Samarkand, Bukhara and Khiva over sixteen quarters, 2022 to 2025, and estimates how changes in four marketing strategies within a hotel relate to changes in its brand equity. Equity is measured in two forms: customer-based, through a branded search index and the online review rating, and market-based, through the premium of the hotel's best available rate (BAR) over its competitive set. Because equity is a stock, the models include the lagged level and distinguish short-run from long-run effects. Comparisons across hotels overstate every strategy's association with the rate premium. The pooled coefficient of promotional share, minus 0.238, falls by 69 per cent with hotel and quarter effects, and those of brand communication and service training fall by more than 95 per cent and lose significance. Three results survive within hotels. First, promotion erodes market-based equity: each point of promotional share lowers the BAR premium by 0.071 points in the quarter and 0.138 points in the long run (bootstrap interval minus 0.192 to minus 0.099). Ten more points of promotional share still raise RevPAR, by 1.66 per cent in the quarter, but by only 1.00 per cent once the erosion of the rate premium is complete. Second, brand communication builds customer-based equity, 2.31 points of branded search per point of revenue spent in the quarter and 6.03 in the long run, and raises occupancy, but has no detectable effect on the rate premium. Third, service training works through reviews: it raises the review rating, which in turn carries the rate premium (1.42 points per rating point), although the total effect of training on the premium is not detected within the panel. Loyalty programme launches raise branded search slowly and leave the rate premium unchanged.