Trademark expert witness William D. Neal is Senior Executive Officer at SDR Consulting and in Modeling Brand Equity, he writes on branding:
Measurement Issues
The challenge to both marketers and marketing researchers is determining how we measure and manage the intrinsic value of a brand (its equity) and how do we tie that value and our attempts to improve value to customer loyalty.Recent literature addressing brand equity indicates that there are several different approaches to measurement. Brand equity can be addressed at either the corporate level or the category level and can also be addressed using internal data or external data. At the corporate level, brand equity can be assessed using internal financial data from the firm’s accounting system, or it can be assessed using comparative financial performance data from similar firms (i.e. external). At the category level, a firm can address brand equity using unit profit margins in comparison to unit marketing costs, and in comparison to the costs of other products in the category. Alternatively, the firm can use consumer surveys to measure the perceived value of the product/brand compared to other products/brands in a category.