Brands
Brands are shared ideas about organizations and what they offer, representing a signficant share of the value of a company's intangible fixed assets by contributing to increased market share and price elasticity.
How brands drive value for companies as an intangible asset:
- Making customers more likely to buy something via the perception of tangible points of Difference or intangible points of Distinction that generate stronger Mental Presence
- Perceptions of quality, reliability, and durability that justify Price premiums
"Brand value represents on average 20% of a business's market capitalization, part of the intangible assets that on average represent 84%" —The brand, the most valuable business tool ever invented
"Brands account for close to a third of a company's value. For the highest performing brands, it can be more than 50%" — Kantar BrandZ’s Brand Valuation Methodology (2024)
"Brands that people are strongly predisposed to have 9x volume share, 2x higher price paid, 4x more likely to grow sales volume" — Kantar
Brands can establish persistent perceptions of difference via:
- Price (value brands)
- Product
- Physical Presence (convenience brands)
- Mental presence (interesting brands)
"Brands with higher awareness levels have a growth Efficiency advantage over others. Meaning the stronger your brand, the further an incremental dollar of performance marketing spend will take you." — Growth efficiency, marketing's existential metric
"For low-consideration purchases, brand effects dominate." — Growth efficiency, marketing's existential metric
"Marketing actions affect sales performance through their differential impact on attitudinal metrics... We find that marketing-attitude and attitude-sales relationships are predominantly stable over Time but differ substantially across brands and product categories" — Consumer Attitude Metrics for Guiding Marketing Mix Decisions
"Brands are a necessary evil: they add a layer of complexity to the buying decision, but they also allow for routines... such habits make buying easier" — How Brands Grow by Byron Sharp
"Brands, well-built and surgically focused offer the necessary vision and direction to build sustained advantage for organisations. That can then be delivered by every customer experience, digital or otherwise." — Richard Huntington
"A prestigious brain imaging study has shown that the same brain area, the so called medial prefrontal cortex, gets activated both when we assess a ‘socially oriented brand’ and when we judge the intentions of people. This demonstrates the extraordinary influence of a brand: even our brain, beyond our conscious awareness, may see brands as powerful as the influence of our friends. Thus a ‘caring’ brand may be as strong in influencing consumers’ behaviour as a conversation with consumers’ friends." — What role do brand cues have in brand equity?
"Our 'beliefs' about brands are nowhere near as stable and consistent as we think. As Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science's work with re-contact surveys has shown, individual opinions about brands are much more volatile than top-line tracking data suggests... People answer research questions in a 'probabilistic' way. They may lean slightly in favour of one brand or another, but they don't have fixed beliefs" — How Not to Plan
"Brands represent enormously valuable pieces of legal property that can influence consumer behavior, can be bought and sold, and offer their owner the security of sustained future revenues. Wall Street believes strong brands result in better earnings and profit performance for firms, which, in turn, create greater value for shareholders." — Marketing Management