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One of the latest fashions from the USA is to require marketing managers to provide proof of the financial return on marketing expenditure. In most instances a straight ROI cannot be worked out because of long/short-term allocation problems of marketing expenditure and thus the "qualitative" (not immediately recognisable sales) nature of marketing spending and marketing itself. It is, however, a challenging idea to relate the core of marketing spending, namely the money invested in brand building and brand management to the basic formula for ROI which is: ROI equals profit (as sales minus costs) over the capital invested for the brand. Starting back to front, what can be said about "capital invested", that is ultimately part of marketing budgets. The asset value, the capital invested in brands was first formally recognised when in 1984 the News Group (Rupert Murdoch) put financial values for some of their "mastheads" (publishing titles) into its balance sheets. What may look like a breakthrough in marketing orientation was, however, quite a different story: Goodwill writeoffs from many acquisitions had ruined the reserves in the balance sheets of the News Group and in particular the debt to equity and other financial ratios which banks are terribly interested in. By "lengthening" the balance sheets on both the asset and liability sides, many ratios were restored to their former glory and the banks were prepared to lend more money for more acquisitions by the News Group. A trend of balance-sheet brand valuations started, stretching from the UK to Australia and finally New Zealand. In the late 1980s already, the New Zealand Society of Accountants tried to define standards for such unconventional balance sheet tactics, but gave up. Currently the standards committee of the NZ Institute of Chartered Accountants is trying again to formulate a standard, which, according to the draft submission, would rule out balance sheet recognition of financial brand valuations. Will they succeed? Probably not, because these asset manipulations have become a fact of life - although not always a marketing fact. The challenge though to the accounting profession is to develop a "brand accounting system" - far beyond the occasional brand valuation. It would have to look a little like this:
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Previous Brand Asset Value
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-
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Depreciation ("natural decay" without marketing support)
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+/-
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Net Brand Marketing Contribution (during the year, marketing budget minus short-term
effects that do not carry over)
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-
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"Waste Factor" (due to Competition, Government influence
etc.)
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Forward Brand Asset Value
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There is another kind of brand equity, sometimes referred to as consumer-based brand equity, which also determines brand profitability. It can be seen as an indicator of the durability of a positive brand image and thus of profitability. Brands, in a way are a "silent salesmen", selling the product even when the sales people are not there. Brand profit therefore depends on the strength of the brand and how well it is managed. The continuous presence of a strong brand in consumers' minds can create enormous marketing productivity effects. The strength of a brand depends entirely on what consumers (users and non-users) think of it. Consumers accumulate consumption- and non-consumption experiences (including word-of-mouth) of known brands in their mind. These "experiences", many but not all caused by marketing strategies, build up over time, and become "imprinted" in people's minds. As a little experiment, just consider two simple brands: JVC and SHARP. By just thinking about these brands not only "pictures" of the actual products associated with them pop up automatically, but also one's personal brand preferences. Surprisingly, apart from the brand names no other marketing input is required to bring up these preferences! Differentiating between the brand trigger such as brand name, a distinctive shape (ie. BMW), colour scheme (BP) etc. and the brand associations (brand image) triggered by them is a first step to understanding what makes good brand management. Since these triggers are learned - and often loved - by consumers, they have to be kept consistent over time. If brand triggers change suddenly (creative people in agencies love to do that), the access to the associations stored in the mind can get irritated. Consumers asking themselves "is this really still the same product" (with a changed brand trigger) can cost millions of hard-earned brand equity dollars and ruin brand profits by throwing consumers back into a search mode. Brand triggers not only have to be consistent over time to ensure consumer trust, but the elements that make up the trigger - brand name, design and other distinctive features - have to be consistent internally. Certain colours, for example, go better with certain types of products than with others. Green men's shoes, for example, are definitely a small niche product. Harmony between the visual elements of the brand trigger - including name, logo, design, packaging etc. - has to be found. This is the high art of branding building which neither academic research nor marketing practice has found hard and fast rules for - yet! The image projected, for example, in advertising, also should be consistent with the appearance and the "meaning" of the brand triggers. It is interesting to observe that the strength of the primary image of the brand triggers is more important for new brands than for established ones for which consumers have built up associations with, which are "imprinted" in their minds. However, even established triggers have to be applied consistently. Consumer-based brand equity goes far beyond just the trigger communication. It comprises of the long-term market benefits for the company from customer satisfaction and brand loyalty, caused by positive brand imprinting of customers, achieved through the net effect of a brand-conscious marketing strategy, product/service usage and word-of-mouth effects. Advertising is but one part of the whole process - although many advertising agencies wrongly fancy themselves as the sole brand image builders! From the consumer perspective the three fundamental building blocks for building brand equity are a) brand/name awareness, b) perceived product quality image, and c) perceived "extended brand image". Awareness is necessary as a base for good brand management, because without awareness, the two - holistically perceived - image components can otherwise not be "hooked in". As a cardinal rule, it is important that both, the perceived product/service quality image and the perceived extended images are distinctive - and synergistic! A not very distinctive commodity-quality-like product (or service) is difficult to brand. A brilliant luxury-quality product with a weak "extended image" is equally difficult to market. It is important - and usually ignored - that different consumer segments perceive the mix of product quality and extended image in different weight combinations. Take as an example what image combinations a middle-of-the-road brand of 'plonk' generates in the mind of a very ordinary wine drinker as compared to a connoisseur. Survey research-based "perceptual mapping" can assist here determining where products and their various image components "sit" versus different benefit-seeking segments of consumers. In business-to-business branding, trigger and various image associations also apply. The contents of the image components may, however, be more business-related - not necessarily more "rational" as naive academic textbooks claim! Also, marketing to an organisation means taking into account the various roles played by various people in the "buying centre". The concept of the "moments of truth" helps: At each point of contact of the marketing organisation with various people in the customer organisation a small part of the overall brand image of the marketing organisation and/or its products is formed, changed and stored. One factor that complicates image building in service businesses is that the production and selling/marketing of a service are usually "intertwined" - and the customers is involved in the production/selling/marketing process. The biggest problem in branding personal services is to get the service deliverers to perform consistently. Finally, "corporate identity" is a form of macro branding of the whole company. It is bigger than mere marketing. The classical tools of corporate identity management are a) "what you market", b) "where you make and market it", c) "how you communicate with all your publics - not just the market, and d) "how people in the organisation behave towards customers in all the publics". In summary, it is not too far-fetched to ask the question whether and how much financial return is achieved by a brand, or the market expenditure fuelling the brand. Although in most cases the actual financial return calculations cannot be worked out precisely, the principle of brands being investments that generate a return is a solid one. When more senior managers have realised that brands are in fact investments and marketing supports those investments, a big shift will occur from the current widely-held perception that marketing is just an add-on cost to all the other costs!
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