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Valuing Corporate Brands

Published on December 11, 2014   39 min

A selection of talks on Strategy

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0:00
Hello my name is James Gregory. I'm the CEO of CoreBrand in New York City. I'm here today to talk about global branding strategies and specifically valuing corporate brands.
0:15
The issue of valuing brands is very complex. First you have the issue of whether you're talking about product brands or corporate brands. Our focus has always been on the corporate brand and I'll explain why little bit later on. It's also complicated by the fact that global brand standards and measurement standards are changing. In the US FASB the Financial Accounting Standards Board has been addressing this issue for quite some time. They punted over to the Australia Accounting Standards Board who is working with the International Accounting Standards Board. All working on an issue of obtaining International Financial Reporting Standards IFRS. Everybody's working towards the same goal. How to account for brands in a way that makes sense. The difficulty is the brand whether it's the corporate brand or product brand is an intangible asset. Intangible assets generally can't be accounted for on the balance sheet unless the company has been bought or sold or the product line has been bought or sold. As marketers we all know that that's not the way brand value is created. It's created over time. We're investing marketing dollars into building a brand and the brand value should be able to be accounted for in some way so that you can make decisions on your investment strategies whether you should invest more in your brand building activities or less and what the return on investment is for that effort. Valuation experts are all thinking about this process in a little bit of a different way. You have companies that work in the black box and don't talk about their methods such as Interbrand and Millward Brown and Brand Finance. CoreBrand believes in really focusing on one particular aspect of brand building which is the corporate brand. Now the valuation standards that I'm talking about today are not gap compliant. They are not part of the generally accepted accounting principles. I'll describe why on the following slides. But our process is a hugely valuable process in terms of creating a practical marketing and management tool that measure the value of the brand as it is being built over time.