An important contemporary management problem in hypercompetition conditions is building brand value. Brand value being the full and final result of marketing operations within a given period constitutes an objective way to measure the efficiency and effectiveness of adopted strategies; hence it is the brand value that should be the key indicator of managerial efficiency. Brand value is approximated by brand equity. A lot of managers nowadays struggle with the problem of poor market results of their brand (reflected in the fall of brand value) which at the same time shows good indexes of brand equity. It might reasonably suppose that assessing brand equity poses a great difficulty. Considering the specific nature of brand equity, a resource generated by a company but accumulated and stored outside a company, which in consumers' minds takes form of general impressions, associations, opinions and values, in an ideological sense, related to a particular trademark the consumer being the "carrier" of brand equity seems to be the best source of information related to it. The problem to measure brand equity hinders approximation of brand value which is the key performance indicator of an adopted marketing strategy. In the face of decreasing return of resources allocated to traditional media, managers are searching for new solutions, and that is why they engage resources in activities conducted in social media. The research problem engaged in this article is to determine whether contemporary consumers are able to assess brand equity in the overabundance of brands and products with similar features and qualities. The author argues that in the existing circumstances when differences between brands become insignificant the consumer is not capable of assessing their equity adequately. In order to verify the thesis the author has accepted the theoretical assumption, that social media creates brand value. Next examines the correlation between brand values and social media metrics with relation to the used brand equity methodology. Results point out to the existence of correlation between brand value and number of Facebook fans only in the case of valuation methodology which included experts in the brand equity assessment process. Thus, self-awareness of customers may be a key factor of the quality of their brand equity assessment. With reference to the author's thesis of this article the existing conditions of oversupply of brands, products and communications, differences between brands become insignificant, and as the result a consumer is not able to accurately assess their equity. Thus, the specific of today market environment conditions may be a satisfactory explanation why customer assessment of brand valuation fails. On the other hand, keeping in mind the fact that there is a big discrepancy between the brand capital declared by customers and their final purchasing decisions regarding a product of a particular brand, it could be helpful to better measure brand competitiveness level understood as a probability of choosing one brand of a given category over other brands of the same category. Developing and including such a factor into brand equity measurement could significantly improve brand value approximation based on customer assessment.
