Last week two brand valuation agencies released their 2009 league tables of the 100 most valuation brands in the world. It is depressing to see that only 58 brands are common to the two lists. How are we meant to take the topic of brand valuation seriously when two of the prominent agencies in this field disagree so widely about which are the most valuable brands in the world?
My general stance is to applaud anyone who tries to put financial or other business parameters around brands as a way to communicate the significance of their contribution to business performance. But I have to wonder whether the topic of brand valuation is not actually doing a disservice to the cause of marketing accountability by revealing such a lack of consistency in the results.
This inconsistency is everywhere – which brands make it into the top 100 list; what the value is of a specific brand (for 15 brands, this differs by a factor of more than 2 between the two lists); even whether the value of a brand has gone up or down over the past 12 months (for 21 brands, the two lists disagree about whether brand value increased or decreased).
The good news is that brand valuation is largely irrelevant to the issue of marketing accountability – see my earlier post on “Measurement is not the same as Accountability.”
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I’d hoped that brand valuation methodologies could, at least, give us insight into whether brands are gaining or losing value. Your post makes me feel that we’ve actually been getting conflicting directions from the scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz.
Of course the true weakness of these models is that they tell us nothing about how to build sustainable value for a brand. Such scorecards are, at best, the ultimate expression of driving while looking in the rear view mirror.