Double vision. Managing the present and future brand

How much is your brand worth to your organization, and how do you manage it? What role does it play in contributing to the bottom line and when? Important questions.

Look at things through a different lens. The brand is not a magical thing made of hyped tactics and creative mystique. It is a managed, intangible asset that pulls people to spend money on your offering and keeps your stakeholders happy.

It should have a quantifiable value, but that value is near impossible to ascertain. In the present it is worth your market cap less intangibles such as IP, the value of your human capital, goodwill compounded by IFRS9 and other factors. Even if you can measure your market cap with equity, how do you accurately quantify the impact of your intangibles?

It gets more complex. The brand is one of your current operational factors, one of the underpinnings of current top line growth, but it also has a future value. What you do now ripples into future results, months, or years down the line. How do you quantify that value?

In short, your brand is an unquantifiable but valuable asset, now and years down the line. The obvious implication is that you need an expense item in the income statement to achieve present and future value, for which you can’t account.

This coincidentally sits comfortably with elements of corporate philosophy such as the vision, mission and values which undeniably contribute value in unquantifiable ways. It’s a fair argument for lumping the brand purpose together with the other elements of philosophy.

Like the value embedded in corporate philosophy, the brand can be managed programmatically, in the present as well as with a long-term view. This requires the use of brand equity schemas which develop and control the strength of elements of the brand, as opposed to brand valuation which attempts to assign a financial value to the brand.

In the short-term, programmatic strategy must use tactics to leverage and convert the brand into volumes or gaining and holding the acceptance of stakeholders. A combination of Kevin Lane Keller’s customer-based brand equity schema and the various elements of 8P-marketing are the tools you can use to attain the outcomes. They offer highly operational methods and immediacy. I will go into Keller in detail in future columns.

The medium to long-term view needs to be obtained and planned for now but with a high degree of vision. An operational bias such as Keller may not adequately determine the long-term outcome, so I tend toward David Aaker who identifies his brand equity schema with longer term outcomes. The key elements will be brand awareness, brand associations and brand loyalty. More detailed descriptions of the three elements, which I will also cover later, reveal how they can be used to construct what amounts to a vision for the brand.

The trick will be to correlate Keller and Aaker, using the idealized outcomes of Aaker’s purpose to map out an operational brand equity management plan using Keller’s method, which can be tracked, tested and adjusted as time goes by.

The combination of Aaker and Keller provides a medium-term opportunity to develop the brand. As the brand is at the core of the future bottom line the ongoing activity of development and medium-term planning and management is as significant to sustainability as the set of short-term activities.

Don’t worry if the complexity gives you a headache and double vision. It affects me the same way.