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Name awareness which is also a part of store knowledge (Hartman and Spiro,2005; Keller, 1993) indicate the ability of customers to recognize and to recall the store name which will activate associations of store image in the customer's memory. Name awareness reflects the strength of a brand's presence in consumers' minds. For retailer equity to occur customers would need to have some familiarity and awareness of the retailer. Without retailer awareness, customers would not develop perceptions of quality, retailer associations or loyalty towards the retailer. Therefore, awareness is a significant part of brand equity (Aaker, 1991; Keller, 1993). Arnett et al. (2003) defined name awareness as the level to which a retailer's name is familiar to consumers and related it to the possibility and ease with which it comes to mind.

Pappu and Quester (2005) conceptualized brand awareness as both brand recognition and brand recall. On this basis retailer awareness is defined as a ‘‘consumer's ability to recognize or recall that the retailer is a member of certain retailer category'' (Pappu and Quester, 2006, p. 320). Aaker (1991) stated that brand awareness can range from simple recognition of the brand to dominancy, that is when consumer recalls a specific brand not another. Hence strong retailer awareness increases the likelihood that a retail brand will be part of the customer future retail brand choice, making it a habit to choose the retail brand (Jinfeng and Zhilong, 2009)

Although awareness is of a great importance in determining equity, it has its share of controversy. The customer based brand equity studies by Yoo et al. (2000) and Yoo and Donthu (2001) combined awareness and associations in one dimension of brand equity, as they did not find any empirical evidence to separate brand awareness from brand associations.

On the other hand, Pappu and Quester (2005/2006) separate awareness from associations and add 'brand awareness' which is similar to Arnett et al. (2003) 'name awareness', as a distinctive dimension of equity. Pappu and Quester (2005/2006), support their conceptualization of brand and retailer equity by empirical evidence where they embrace more discriminate indicators for measuring retailer awareness (awareness and recognition characteristics come to mind quickly) and consider each one of them as distinct dimensions of retailer equity. They argue that for a customer to have perceptions of quality they need to be aware of the retailer. Hence, the degree of a customer's awareness on a retail brand reflects on retailer loyalty.

Store awareness have been suggested to have an important role with retailing on the Internet (Hartman and Spiro, 2005; Rios and Riquelme, 2008). Awareness plays an important role in customer decision making. Store awareness may affect customer thoughts of a store; and also it may influence the structure and strength of a store association in store image.

2.8 Association as a Dimension of Retailer Equity:

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