“…Brands are strategic marketing tools used to facilitate product differentiation for customers (Kotler & Gertner, 2002). Brand equity is comprised of the three dimensions of consumer knowledge, familiarity, and associations; as such, brands accrue equity on the basis of consumers' knowledge and the consequent relations they establish with brands (Filieri et al, 2019;Tong & Hawley, 2009). Researchers have increasingly used brand equity models to examine factors affecting purchase intention in the smartphone industry, including Apple, Samsung, HTC, Nokia, and Blackberry in countries such as Indonesia (Wijaya, 2013), Korea (Park & Lee, 2012), Malaysia (Bojei & Hoo, 2012;Lay-Yee et al, 2013), Pakistan (Abid & Khattak, 2017), Portugal (Loureiro & Kaufmann, 2017), Thailand (Jing et al, 2014), and Vietnam (Wollenberg & Thuong, 2014).…”