Brands are emotive and we cannot measure emotion.

Brand evaluation is vital to the success of the brand. It enables brand owners to see where the brand’s strengths and weaknesses lie and what forces are driving these, which in turn points to the nature and level of investment needed to fulfil the brand’s potential.

Measuring brand performance is an integral part of brand management. The financial value of a brand is not interesting on its own; it’s what we can do to grow it that makes it interesting. The process of benchmarking a brand’s value involves understanding where that brand value comes from and supporting those areas to grow the strength of the brand.

A thorough evaluation looks not only at the financial value of the brand but also at the brand equity – the intangible elements of a brand that distinguish it in the mind of the consumer. But how is something as intangible as brand value actually measured?

But surely the more established brands you have the better?

The brand portfolio includes all the brands and sub-brands attached to product-market offerings, including co-brands with other brands. In order to distribute our investment most effectively it is important to look at the relationships between all the sub-brands and their strategic importance in overall brand building. This will help us answer the following questions:

• What is the logic of the structure?
• Does it provide clarity to the customer rather than complexity and confusion?
• Does the logic promote synergy and leverage?
• Does it provide a sense of order, purpose and direction to the organisation?
• Or does it suggest ad-hoc decision making that will lead to strategic drift and an incoherent jumble of brands?

Surely every brand has to die sometime!

If left to their own devices, most brands inevitably find themselves in a state of decline as they lose relevance or competitors steal market share. Imagine if the Levi’s brand had been left as it started and Levi’s were still marketed as hard wearing trousers for miners – would the brand still be as successful as it is today?

But brands don’t have to die. Unlike products, there is no defined life cycle for a brand and they can, in theory, live forever. Brands are precious – they are often a company’s most valuable asset – and by carefully controlling and tweaking them, in line with the brand strategy, they can be protected from decline and nurtured into growth. That is the ultimate purpose of brand management and development.

A strong brand will look after itself.

Brand strategy is one of the most fraught areas of marketing, though clearly also one of the most important. There are many problems with definition. The key point is we can’t have a strategy without a clear objective.

Restating a goal is not strategy, execution is not strategy, and tactics are not strategy. A brand cannot function without a strategy and the function of brand management is to implement brand strategy.

Brands don’t ‘work’ – surely it’s just about spending money to make products look good?

A brand is the sum of the tangible and intangible benefits provided by a product or service and encompasses the entire customer experience. Brands are thus pivotal to the relationship between companies and their customers.

A successful brand has both a unique point of differentiation from the competition, and values that the customer segment really wants. This added value allows the company to add profit to the bottom line and, ultimately, increase shareholder value.

Isn’t branding only relevant in the fmcg sector?

Branding as a discipline is probably most commonly associated with fmcg (fast moving consumer goods) – physical products bought more or less routinely. Many consumer companies such as Coca-Cola, Unilever, Nestlé and Procter & Gamble have set the standard for brand marketing.

However, brands are developed in every category and it is important to understand what these categories are and how the process of branding differs in each one.

Perhaps the most significant development is the evolution of the organisation brand which introduces the idea of stakeholders as a key target audience.

Aren’t brands just about dressing a product up in pretty packaging?

People don’t drink a sweet-tasting brown liquid: they drink Coca-Cola, with all the connotations surrounding that brand. The value of brands resides in the minds of those who use them. Brands may start life in planning documents but ultimately they rest in the minds and hearts of people.

Brands are thus much more than just logos or names. They are the culmination of a user’s total experience with the product or service (or company) over many years. That experience is made of a multitude of good, neutral and bad encounters, such as the way a product performs, an advertising message, a press report, a telephone call, or a rapport with a sales assistant.

In a wider sense, a brand is the effect on the user of everything the company does and how it behaves. It is not the responsibility of one department but of the whole organisation. Every employee influences brand encounters.

Get it right and the brand strengthens, users become more loyal, shareholder value increases, business partners are attracted and employees enjoy a better environment. Every stakeholder has a stake in the brand.