3 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Building Your Brand

Interesting article by Clyde Fessler, former vice president, business development, Harley-Davidson Motor Company.

In today’s international business world, it is becoming more difficult to compete successfully and, ultimately, provide a return to investors.

The proliferation of competitors, short term objectives, and opportunities to place investment dollars elsewhere also make it difficult to invest in building brands

Building a brand takes commitment, focus, and three to five years of complimentary programmes. It is not just an advertising programme. It is a company-wide effort that unifies everyone’s energies, toward the same common objective.

It takes dedication and a focus of limited resources to execute the various strategies in the different functions of the company. Each department had to take its turn, develop its plans and execute a defined strategy.

But first, there are three strategic questions to ask yourself when building a brand:

Who are we?

Is your company a house of several brands, or is your company a branded house with sub-brands? What does your company do? Provide a service, promote a cause, build a product, or create a lifestyle? Whatever it is, your statement of who you are should differentiate yourself from your competitors. Continue reading

4 Brand Valuation Methods

Value has different meanings to different people. The objective of the valuation is determined by its use. Some of the more common valuation approaches are market based/direct measurement method; brand communication investments based method; awareness and franchise valuation method; finance based/indirect measu- rement method; excess-earnings method and relief-from-royalty method.

The simplest direct measurement is to add all the brand’s communication investments, adjusted for inflation. An additional adjust- ment is sometimes made to account for and reward the risk taken by past managers. This adjustment is called the discount rate and it is used to compute the net present value of the successive investments, that is, what they are worth today. The method is simplistic and overvalues the brands; but brand buyers use it for that very reason. It also penalises brands that do not advertise heavily.
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Yet Another Brands Top 10

Another month, another top of brands. Another brand consulting company, Millward Brown Optimor, decided to set-up another way of having brands ranked, so we got another top where Microsoft got the first place.

This time the goal of the study was to calculate the value a brand is expected to generate for its owner in the future. The top brands were shown to contribute tens of billions to future earnings..

The top was calculated base on three criterias:

  • brand’s earning power going forward
  • intangible earnings, which was based on financial data for a brand owner’s business, such profits and operating costs;
  • brand contribution, which used survey data from 650,000 consumers on how brand affects their purchasing decisions.

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