On brand rankings and valuations

I recently went on a rabbit hole mission to look into what brand rankings offer companies - and it turns out very little.

Some take aways from the PDF you can read here.

BRAND IS NOT ABOUT A LOGO IT IS AN EMOTIONAL RESPONSE.

Brand strategy is a specialist area of advertising compared to general marketing and communications disciplines.

The concept of a brand itself is largely intangible – the merits of which are hard to define, let alone measure.

However, like all creative disciplines – such as art, design or user experience - this does not mean there are no measures, but that they are highly contextual, industry-specific and largely at the discretion of the author.

Enter the brand valuation rankings.

LIKE ALL EMOTIONAL RESPONSES THEY ARE OBSERVED, RECOREDED AND MEASURED QUANTIFIABLE IN PATTERNS, NOT ABSOLUTES.

All elastic markets accept that there may be different points of view on the value or worth of something. Your house or car on the market, the prediction of a share price and so on.

The problem with this is it often throws into question how brands can ”truly” be evaluated as creative industries must look beyond the stock market price point to determine total brand value. And there’s so many different ways to do it.

While this is often led by a great deal of self-importance (who would have known in the industry?) looking at the same brand success from multiple angles gives us much more insight and contextual lenses than ‘one rank to rule them all’.

It provides the advertising industry to consider different intangible aspects of a brand that might make it more valuable than others, make predictions over time, and ultimately – what to do next. For example, who the value is being valued for such as the power of Chinese brands to be exported.

Let’s look at an interesting deal between BrandZ and BrandAsset Valuator (BAV) - see the deck.

What becomes even more interesting is that when these integration of tools seeks to evaluate a market as small as Australia it tells your absolutely nothing about why or what these brands should be doing.

Knowing the banks and telcos are the most valuable brands in Australia says nothing about the cultural impact of these or other brands on the Australian identity beyond the size in the market place – and even then, where’s BHP?

BrandZ seems to have taken a step back in terms of its own brand value by entering a such a confusing partnership. I am – at the time of writing – still not entirely sure how this works together.

When the BAV model is set-out like a scientific paper (but not all the time) but can also be fairly easily picked off by a relatively junior marketing executive, it doesn’t stack up well.

To me, this reads little less than a wish-list of clients for the authors. The used a sub-standard technology and a flawed methodology – sure, yes its complex to determine brand, but this approach is wide of the mark.

Perhaps a more independent would be the Forbes top brand list, but something tells me they want the ad dollars as much as us agency people.

SO WHAT?

BRAND Z CAN BE A USEFUL RANKING TOOL FOR PATTERNS – HANDLE IT WITH CARE.

BAV IS A MAPPING TOOL THAT CONFUSES MARKET PERFORMANCE AND BRAND EQUITY.

PLEASE KEEP THEM AWAY FROM EACH OTHER.

CREATE YOUR OWN METHODLOGIES, USE TRUSTED TOOLS AND FIND YOUR OWN TRUTHS.