The brand value for companies like Apple, Google, and Coca-Cola continue to soar. For these companies, brands are billion dollar assets. According to a 2008 report by Millard Brown Optimor, a leading research organization, the financial value of the top five brands in the world is estimated at a combined $343 billion dollars!(1) The ability to take an intangible asset and turn it into tangible value is certainly impressive; the ability to turn it into a billion dollar asset, however, makes it necessary to take a closer look on how we define branding.
Merriam-Webster defines a brand “a class of goods identified by name as the product of a single firm or manufacturer.” It also goes further to define a brand name by saying it relates to “having a well-known and usually highly regarded or marketable name.”(2) The problem with these definitions is that they’re short-sighted, outdated, and incorrect.
I define a brand as “an intangible asset defined by customer and marketplace perceptions, which are shaped by the amalgamation of an organization’s symbols, colors, collateral, products, services, and human interactions.” In other words, a brand encompasses everything. Every person, every action, and every symbol is part of a company’s brand. The power of branding is well known. In fact, most know that a strong brand can give a company a significant competitive advantage—but in today’s global marketplace, it can also be worth billions.
1. Millard Brown Optimor, Top 100 Most Powerful Brands, April 2008.
2. http://www.merriam-webster.com
No comments:
Post a Comment