Companies are spending millions of dollars to create awareness of their products and market their brand. What the company reaps from this expenditure can make or break it.
Your brand is more than the products or services that you sell. It is what you stand for. Your company logo, products, website, or marketing campaigns may change with time, but your brand value must always remain the same.
Consumers are constantly looking for connections with brands, hence, it’s good for companies to offer consumers something that they can relate to. This goes beyond an attractive website or a beautiful logo. Although the external elements of your brand like your name and your voice can help to create brand awareness, it is your brand value that will deliver real engagement and help you create powerful bonds with your target audience.
In this article, we will be discussing brand value in depth. We will also be sharing what 6 successful brand managers had to say about the importance of brand value.
What is Brand Value?
Rani Cohen, Chief Marketing Officer, Australian Family Lawyers, defines brand value as follows:
“ Brand value is the ‘perceived value’, and how often people will choose one brand over alternatives. Brand value is important because when people perceive that a brand is distinct and aligns with their personal values, it’s a really powerful competitive advantage.”
So, brand value refers to the worth of a brand to the consumer. It is a subject of much debate in the world of marketing, and there are two schools of thought about its definition:
Financial worth — This is the monetary value assigned to a brand. Perceived worth — The worth that consumers perceive your brand.
Let’s have a look at both.
Financial worth denotes the market value of a brand. It can be calculated based on the current and future sales, as well as the potential for future growth. For example, the financial brand value of Coca-Cola is around $78 billion.
The perceived worth denotes how important consumers feel your brand is to their life, social status, or job. For example, both Coca-Cola and Pepsi are soda companies, but many soda drinkers perceive Coca-Cola to have a higher brand value than Pepsi.
When consumers find value in a brand, they can develop loyalty towards it, and this can discourage other companies from joining the market. This can protect the market share of a company. For example, a diaper brand like Pampers is well-known in the market. Other companies may opt for other product lines outside of diapers to avoid competing with well-known companies, which may be detrimental to their bottom line.
Is Brand Value the Same As Brand Equity?
If the term brand value makes you think of dollars and cents, you’re partly correct.
When customers know and love your brand, they are willing to pay more. This is known as brand equity. In other words, brand equity is the price above the product’s market value that consumers are willing to pay.
Brand equity and brand value are linked, but strictly speaking, they are not the same thing.
Why Is Brand Value Important?
Let’s imagine you’re negotiating the acquisition or merger of a major brand.
If you were taking over Coca-Cola, you would be buying a lot more than the recipe for a caffeinated, sugary drink. You would be benefiting from the name, logo, and other brand elements that consumers instantly recognize and trust.
Source: Pexels
Brand value is a fairly modern phenomenon. In the past, consumers relied on product quality and value to make purchasing decisions. However, the advertising boom of the 1960s turned certain businesses into brand names.
With the emergence of modern marketing, companies could choose to associate themselves with positive characteristics such as style, elegance, trustworthiness, security, and innovation. This is essentially building a brand — a key element of any marketing strategy today.
Pretty much everyone agrees a strong brand is valuable — the tricky part is putting a number on that value.
How Is Brand Value Calculated?
Your brand is a valuable asset. With other assets in life, such as your house or your car, you can easily do some research and figure out the going rate.
Calculating the value of a brand, however, is more complex.
We consider a brand’s value to be a measurable concept encompassing the total net worth of your brand.
Key factors include brand recognition (have consumers heard of you?), brand image (how do consumers perceive you?), brand usage (are customers actively buying from you and using your product?), and brand loyalty (do customers stick with you over the competition?).
One simple way to gain insight into your brand value is to send brand surveys to your customers. Direct customer feedback will show you how people perceive your brand.
With brand analytics technology, you can accurately measure your brand awareness and track levels of recognition, popularity, and loyalty among specific relevant audiences. This helps you make better-informed decisions related to your brand.
If you are spending time and budget on brand marketing and campaigns it is vital to measure the impact of what you are doing.
After all, just like an IT manager or accountant can easily point to cost reductions in technology systems or show increased profitability, modern brand managers need to be able to show how their brand has increased or decreased in value over time.
What Makes A Brand Valuable
Valuable brands have a few things in common. A brand is considered valuable if it’s:
- Highly recognizable (people know who they are)
- Positively perceived (people have a good view of them)
- Popular (people actually buy and use the products or services)
- Have a loyal following (customers are ambassadors of the brand)
How to Build/Achieve your Brand Value
According to Walter Landor, the Branding Pioneer, products are manufactured in the factory, but brands are created in the mind. It may be easy to calculate the physical value of your products, but it’s consumer perception that will determine the value your brand has in the marketplace.
This means that it’s important for you to build value into your brand and communicate that value to your customers.
The following are some of the ways through which you can build or achieve brand value:
#1: Improve the Consumer Experience
Amazon is the leading brand in the world, with a value of $415.8 billion. But, how did they get there?
They worked on consumer experience. Amazon is well-known for providing a great user experience. Consumers love the speed and convenience of buying books and other items on their site.
The point is, make it easy for customers to buy from you. If customers are not impressed when interacting with your brand or if the process of making purchases is too complex to follow, then there will be no reason for them to remain loyal to your brand.
So, you should take a look at your platforms and processes. Is it easy to use and navigate through your website? Is it mobile responsive? Is your customer service team effective?
If you work on the above areas and others, you will improve your user experience and build your brand value.
#2: Understand your Target Audience
If you need to build a strong brand, you MUST understand your customers and appeal to their needs. This means that you should create original and creative adverts that go beyond products and features and taps into customer emotions.
Apple, one of the top brands in the world, discovered this trick and employed it in their marketing campaigns. When they launched the iPod, they used the tagline, “1000 songs in your pocket”. They didn’t focus on product features or technical specs.
Apple has shown that they truly understand their customers. They design sleek and easy-to-use products.
Understanding who your customers are and meeting their needs is ideal for building brand value. This will give you ideas about what you should say to them.
Building brand value also requires finding a group of people who desperately care for what you are saying. You should target people who will find your brand and products valuable, instead of casting a wide net. So, you must know the channel where your target audience is and customize your brand message for that channel.
#3: Be Unique
You must put in effort for your brand to stand out, which may mean breaking out of your comfort zone.
Be willing to challenge the current standards of the market and go where your competitors can’t or won’t. Being unique will help you to distinguish yourself from your competitors. But how can you remain unique?
The answer is simple. By sticking to the core values of your company.
#4: Work from the Inside Out
To build your brand value, you must employ a technique called remarkable marketing. It is the art of building things that are worth noticing into your product or service.
For example, nobody will be amazed by a brown cow, as the world is full of brown cows. So, how can you stand out from the herd? By being the purple cow.
To build a strong brand value, focus on superlatives. The happiest employees, most innovative, the best customer service, etc.
#5: Keep your Tone of Voice (ToV) Consistent
Brand consistency is very key in building brand value. The more often you present the personality of your organization to prospective buyers, the more likely they will remember you.
If you use the same tone, language, and opinions in your output, you will do away with confusions and allow your audience to establish easy associations with your content.
Create a formal set of ToV guidelines to guide in the creation of future content and ensure that your blogs, emails, and social posts all speak with one voice.
#6: Use High Standards for Design
Design is good for visual communication. How you use shapes, colors, and fonts or lay out elements on your website, product package, or email campaign will determine whether your brand is perceived as valuable or not.
The way you package your brand will determine how it is perceived and interpreted. Your company may be small but a “strong visual branding system” can make it seem more powerful or create the impression of a large company’s strength on consumers.
On the other hand, if you use a bad design, you will destroy your brand value.
Advice on Building Brand Value from 5 Successful Brand Managers
#1: Clare Jones, Marketing Manager at Custom Neon
“ Whilst we are specialists in making a brand eye-catching, appealing and identifiable, adding brand value is something that needs to be established more intrinsically. Your values must be at the very heart of the business and act as a catalyst to gather momentum.
“ A customer won’t mind paying a little more for a product or service, if they feel they are buying into something more profound. Perhaps your brand supports local struggling communities or is staunchly eco-friendly, maybe you advocate for fair trade or equality in the workplace, these types of values will sit well with a certain demographic and you should capitalize on that.
“ With the evolution of marketing, businesses can choose to position themselves in any light they wish. Charitable, trustworthy, luxurious, innovative, compassionate, whatever suits the target market, but with the modern marketing evolution comes infinite exposure.”
“ Brand value is so much more than just financial worth. To me, the value of a brand depends on how well it provides customers with a unique experience and how a company stands out from the crowd of companies that offer the same services. If you know anything about property management, then you know the industry needs vast improvement. By consistently highlighting that my brand stands for excellence, collaboration, accountability and entrepreneurial spirit, I’m showing the possible clientele that our strong team doesn’t make the same mistakes that our competitors do.”
“ Brand value is important to any company as your reputation will find or lose you more clients before they visit your site themselves. Many still rely on the recommendations of friends and family before they decide to go with a product themselves. With brand value, you can also expect to know what your customers say to their friends and family about the quality of your products or service. Having a customer experience that matches your brand value will be the best way to ensure that new clients learn more about your company!”
#4: John McGhee Owner of Webconsuls
“ Brand value is important because it sets you apart from your competitors by highlighting your unique value and it sets the bar for every other marketing element. If your brand value is high, customers see every other step in their user journey through this lens. From a digital perspective, if the brand value is perceived as high, users tend to trust the content more and be far more engaged on average. Your brand, and its perceived value, is the online version of the first impression.”
#5: Hamna Amjad, Outreach Manager at Physicians Thrive
”Brand values represent the unique personality of your brand and help in distinguishing your brand from your competitors.
”Your brand values lie at the core of its existence. So knowing it yourself and explaining it to your customers is imperative if you want your business to be successful. You must clearly define why you do what you do and how it helps people or solves certain problems in society. This should be the very foundation of your company and the center of your brand’s vision. All your business decisions should be based on that.
“Your brand values control how your customers perceive your brand. With so many brands available in the market, it’s hard to get your consumers’ attention. They no longer gravitate towards just any brand, even if it provides good services or products. They prefer brands that reflect their values and beliefs. You can create a powerful bond with your customers by attracting the right audience that resonates with you.”
Key Takeaways
Brand value is more than the products or services that a company sells. It is what they stand for. Brand value helps a company to build strong bonds with its target audience. It is the reason why a customer will prefer Coca-Cola over Pepsi, Mercedes Benz over Nissan, etc.
For a company to build or achieve brand value, it must improve its user experience. This means making the interactions between their brand and customers as easy as possible. Big brands like Amazon discovered this trick and made it easy for customers to shop on their websites, and this has seen them get to where they are today.
Building brand value also requires a company to stay unique. This may mean a company going where its competitors cannot or won’t. This will help the brand to remain unique from its competitor brands. Brand loyalty is the key to customer loyalty and business growth.
Updated on July 27th 2021
Originally published at https://latana.com.
