What's In A Name?

Despite its impact on business success, brand owners still face challenges when demonstrating the importance of brand in the boardroom, says Siegel + Gale’s Ben Osborne

- Ben Osborne

David Ogilvy, considered by many to be the father of advertising, described a brand as the intangible sum of a product’s attributes. The important word here being intangible.

Likewise, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos defines a brand as what people say about you when you’ve left the room. A clear and succinct explanation but once again a tangible, boardroom-ready explanation escapes him.

Brand owners face a serious challenge. How do they lobby for and sustain investment in their brand? How do they put a value or price-tag on something one can neither see nor touch?

Brand is not the only intangible asset being talked about in boardrooms. Other intangibles like human capital, intellectual property and customer data are also edging their way up the agenda. But how do we also isolate brand from these other intangible assets in order to show why it’s important to invest in brand over people, IP or customer data?

Brand valuation – an approach mixing both art and science – has been a method used to calculate the total financial value of a specific brand since the late 1970s.