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How Much Is Your Brand Worth, And Do You Care?

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This article is more than 9 years old.

I thought that we small business entrepreneurs could learn a lot from studying the Forbes annual ranking of brands (The World’s Most Valuable Brands), but I wasn’t sure what. Especially since there are so few surprises.

Six of the top 10 brands are tech companies’ – seven if you count GE. Most of us could guess that Apple’s brand is at the top of the list and that Microsoft’s and Google’s would be somewhere nearby, but would you have guessed that Louis Vuitton’s is the world’s No. 10 most valuable brand? Me either.

Care to guess how many of the top 100 brands belong to companies that have been around for 100+ years? Thirty-two of them! And four of those are in the top 10: Coca Cola, IBM, General Electric and Louis Vuitton .

If resiliency counted, I’d nominate IBM for #1. Not too long ago IBM and PCs were almost synonyms. IBM seemed to lose its way for a while and yet it’s the #4 brand today, #4 in the whole world.

Brands Matter

The Forbes list tells us how much a brand is worth in dollars – the brand value, not the value of the company. Forbes also tells us how its experts figured it out.

Apple ’s value is astronomic at the moment: $104.3 billion. That’s more than the 10 brands between numbers 50 and 59 combined. It’s more than the values of Toyota’s, AT&T’s, Mercedes-Benz’s, Disney’s and Wal-Mart’s brands combined and yet those five great companies, combined, spend 15 times the money on advertising that Apple does. Hmmm.

But we’re small to medium size entrepreneurs, you and I. What does all this big brand stuff have to do with us? There are a million of us for every one of them.

What can they teach us?

Over the years, I’ve been lucky enough to work with a dozen or so of the top 100 brands at one level or another. When I look at the list the first thing I think of is focus. Every one of these companies focuses intensely on its brand and all its top people understand the brand thoroughly. Anything less and a company loses focus and the brand starts to wobble. Focus has two parts. The second part is the audience. Brand managers understand their target audiences as well as they understand the brands themselves.

The second thing is that some brands transcend words and images. Apple’s logotype and apple-with-a-bite-out-of-it symbol are iconic. But Apple itself, the essence of the brand, could probably change its name to Pomegranate tomorrow, benefit from the flurry of free publicity and carry on as it always has. That wouldn’t work with Louis Vuitton. Why would it work for Apple? Because part of the essence of the brand is that it’s the kind of company that would change its name to something like Pomegranate.

Mercedes-Benz undoubtedly treasures its 3-pointed star in a circle. I suspect they could drop the image or use it sparingly without any damage at all. Merecedes brand essence trumps the image.

Accenture was Anderson Consulting until it changed its name in 1989. It’s now the No. 49 brand in the world.

Brands of any kind create an expectation of an experience but first people have to know what to expect.  That’s not a problem with top brands; their audiences know what to expect. It’s a problem for smaller brands, though, because a big part of brand is bringing brand essence and audience expectations together. That takes time and there are always missteps.

Studying companies with great brands can help us think in the right directions.

For starters, very few big brands started off big. Apple, Microsoft, Facebook all started very small and zoomed up, way up, very quickly. Why? How? Luckily there are a lot of books (and even movies) that explain essentials pretty well.

Your brand, small and entrepreneurial as it may be, can grow, become more valuable and deliver on its promise consistently. It all starts with understanding what your brand is, its essence, learning how to build it, burnish it and protect it. It takes focus.

I’d start by reading a few books about great brands, then by writing out a simple sentence of what the essence of your brand is now. Next I’d ask your customers what they think the essence of your brand is. Then I’d work on the (likely) giant gap between your vision and your customers’.