Application Of Brand Asset Valuator In Brand Management

Brand equity is a multidimensional concept, and complex enough to require many different types of measures. Applying multiple measures increases the diagnostic power of marketing research and the likelihood that managers will better understand what is happening to their brands and, perhaps more important. According to the brand value chain, sources of brand equity arise from the customer mind-set. In general, measuring sources of brand equity requires that the brand manager fully understand how customers shop for products and services and most important, what customers know, think, and feel about various brands.

The BAV model is developmental in that it explains how brands grow, how they get into trouble, and how they recover. BAV measures brands on four fundamental measures of equity value plus a broad array of perceptual dimensions. It provides comparative measures of the equity value of thousands of brands across hundreds of different categories, as well as a set of strategic brand management tools for planning: brand positioning, brand extensions, joint branding ventures and other strategies designed to assess and direct brands and their growth. BAV represents a unique brand equity research tool. Unlike most conventional brand image surveys that adhere to a narrowly defined product category, respondents evaluate brands in a category-agnostic context. Brands are percentile ranked against all brands in the study for each brand metric. Thus, by comparing brands across as well as within categories, BAV is able to draw the broadest possible conclusions about how consumer-level brand equity is created and built or lost.

The key principles of Brand Management

Here are the major brand management principles that can usher in business success.

Define your brand

It all begins with authenticity, the key purpose, mission, vision, position, character and value. Focus on what you can do best and then communicate your strengths with consistency. There have been several instances where companies acquired other brands, only to sell them off later, because the acquisitions didn’t fit into the parent company’s brand architecture. Microsoft acquired Razor fish—a major internet and technological innovation company when it bought a Quantive a digital marketing service company for about $6 billion in 2007. But a couple of years later, Microsoft sold off razor fish for about $530 million.

Start inside out

All those working for your company can tell you what they feel and think of your brand. And that’s the story you must place before your customers. Drive the impact beyond mere marketing walls.

Connect at the emotional level

A brand is not just a logo, name, website, public relations exercise, or TV commercials. These are merely tools and not the brand. A brand is a much larger thing, a desirable idea manifested in products or services, places, people, and experience.

Coffee major Starbucks created a third space experience that was exclusive and desirable so that people preferred staying back and pay for the overpriced coffee.

Empower brand champions

Award those who love your brand and help to drive home a message, so that they can be a part of the brand building process. If your brand advocates stops telling you what you should do and what you shouldn’t, it’s about time you start evaluating the brand promise.

Brand Target

Go and speak to someone working at an Apple retail outlet, or an iPad owner and you’ll see how passionate they are about the company. It’s almost a culture and a lifestyle.

Stay flexible and relevant

A brand that’s well managed should always remain open to adjustments. Remember, branding is not a race but a process. It’s not an eventuality. So constantly tweak the message for your target group and refresh your company’s image.

Measure the effectiveness

Focus on the return on investment (ROI), which is a key indicator to measure the effectiveness of your brand management strategies. It often depends on how well your company can be inspired to carry out these strategies. The effectiveness is also reflected in your brand valuation i.e. how the customers react to your product and price adjustments.

Relationship between branding and finance

Five factors were discovered during a study wherein it was found that changes in brand attitude were associated contemporaneously with stock return and led accounting financial performance. These five factors were new products, product problems, competitor actions, changes in top management, and legal actions. Additionally, another study found out that brand equity has a positive relationship to stock return, an incremental effect to other accounting variables such as the net income of the firm. There searchers have also found that strong brands deliver greater returns to stockholders compared to a relevant market benchmark. Plus, they did so with less risk. Another study found that the responses of stock market participants to brand extension announcements depend interactively and non-monotonically on brand attitude and familiarity.

Furthermore, the stock market has the most favorable response to extensions of high-esteem, high-familiarity brands and to low-esteem, low-familiarity brands. However, the stock market has a less favorable response for extensions of brands which have high popularity but low consumer regard.