Brand assessment is a difficult thing to get right for companies, and in some respects it requires a leap of faith that can be uncomfortable for some people. The brand assessment process can be especially difficult for small businesses and growing start-ups because of the information asymmetry they suffer under. They suffer from the folly of small sample sizes because it is difficult to get enough feedback from the external environment to know what the brand is actually about. This can complicate matters and leave marketing professionals and executives feel as if they are swimming in doubt.
One of the best things about a brand assessment process in terms of defining brand value is that it allows for both an outward looking and inward looking process (Delgado-Ballester & Dabiote, 2015). The company must first look to itself, getting information from employees on what the company is all about. It should consider all of the marketing materials it has produced and all of the pitches it has used to sell itself to the market. Only when a company truly knows itself through this sort of audit can a company begin to look at the external environment to try and understand the positioning of the internal brand versus the needs of the external market (Huang & Sarigoellue, 2014).
The more difficult part of the brand assessment process, which makes it a difficult tool to use for brand value, is the external analysis. Understanding what the brand means to consumers and the market at large can be difficult at times. Even when companies conduct market research and spend their money on surveys and the like, it can still be difficult for those companies to get a good sense (Kirk, Ray, & Wilson, 2013). One of the factors that complicates this analysis even further is the fact that the companies that need to do brand re-evaluations the most are the companies that are least likely to have the kind of brand standing that would create enough information to do a proper assessment.
- Delgado-Ballester, E., & Fernandez Sabiote, E. (2015). Brand experimental value versus brand functional value: which matters more for the brand?. European Journal of Marketing, 49(11/12), 1857-1879.
- Huang, R., & Sarigoellue, E. (2014). Assessment of brand equity measures. International journal of market research, 56(6), 783-806.
- Kirk, C. P., Ray, I., & Wilson, B. (2013). The impact of brand value on firm valuation: The moderating influence of firm type. Journal of Brand Management, 20(6), 488-500.
