Abstract: Brand equity has become an important competitive resource in the fierce market competition. Both advertising and R&D have important impact on brand equity. New ventures are always faced with the “liability of newness”. Lacking of resources makes them difficult to use the combination of these two differentiation strategies to develop brand equity at the same time. In order to examine how advertising and R&D expenditures influence the brand equity of new ventures at different stage of new ventures, an empirical analysis based on data from the large questionnaire of 1621 new ventures is conducted by using binary logistic regression, and verify the relationships between advertising, R&D and brand equity, The results show that the advertising and R&D expenditures both have a positive effect on brand equity of new ventures. And during the start-up period, R&D has a greater effect on brand equity than advertising. Meanwhile, advertising loses the effect on brand equity of new ventures after obtaining the financing.

Key words: R&, D