I was at the CASS business school Global Brand Forum earlier this week and heard a fascinating talk from David Haigh of Brand Finance on brand valuation and the new ISO standard in this area (ISO 10668).
Brand valuation needs financial and legal input of course. And it also needs a whole lot of market research such as market trends and consumer trends.
But, to get it right, it also needs a robust, quantified understanding of how consumers experience a brand.
Understanding the value of the consumer experience will involve measuring a number of “rational” and “emotional” parameters and these could include:
- Benchmarking the utility of products
- Benchmarking the usability of products
- Evaluating emotional responses to brand imagery and language found in advertising, in retailers and on the products (and indeed in other touchpoints such as call centres and bills)
- Measuring how forgiving people are when things go wrong
- Identifying the extent to which consumers are loyal and further, are advocates for the brand
- Identifying the extent to which the brand is enhanced by mimicking the functionality used by other leading brands (for instance does the brand imitate Amazon’s one-click purchasing or Google’s approach to search)
- Identifying how engaged consumers are with the brand and any brand communications (including the website)
- Quantifying the value of social media buzz (for instance are people kinder about your brand than they are about other brands?)
Not all of these are particularly easy to measure in absolute terms (although some are) but all should at least be relatively simple to measure comparatively against competitor brands.
Companies like Amberlight (www.amber-light.co.uk) who evaluate customer experience are not generally asked to link this to brand valuation. But without this type of expertise the values attributed to brands will surely be flawed.
Jeremy Swinfen Green's YabaDabaDoo 