Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Commerce, 2002. / This thesis presents a new approach to the measurement of consumer brand
equity outcomes. The approach links financial performance with consumer
behaviour to acknowledge the true source of a brand's strength. The
methodology developed can be used to value brands for a variety of
purposes ranging from corporate accounting, to taxation, to trademark
protection and to capital market analysis. Its most significant application
might well become the re-positioning of marketing as the leader of a
company-wide activity that contributes to and protects shareholder wealth.
The study concludes that the function of marketing has become too
introspective and is in danger of allowing its essential role of building and
maintaining brands to be taken over by the company as a whole. Brands
today are becoming the responsibility of the board and marketing is
increasingly seen as a function that deals with certain extemal agencies and
buys their services.
The author has studied the extant valuation methodologies and has found
that they avoid incorporating consumer perceptions of brands: the main
reason why brands exist and thrive. The explanation for this is to avoid what
the financial community call the "soft issues". And yet it is these so called
"soft issues" that determine the value of the brand. Brand equity is defined as
the value a brand adds to a non-branded, or commodity, version. This value
is invested in the brand by its users and to ignore this in a valuation
methodology is to omit a key variable.
The methodology presented in this thesis deals with this fundamental
requirement and departs from the conventional approaches in four
substantive ways:
• It uses the Capital Asset Pricing Model to estimate the cost of capital
which acts as a proxy for the commodity or non-branded version.
• An adapted Delphi approach iteration survey isolates the super profits
attributable to the brand from the other profit generating resources.
• By analysing the category in which the brand sells according to four
defining variables - longevity, leadership, barriers to entry, and
vulnerability - time markers are set for notional category dominant and
marginal brands.
• Survey based consumer data provides quantitative statistics that are
reduced to Brand Knowledge Structure (BKS) scores. These are
substituted for the dominant and marginal brand markers to establish
the Brand Expected Life.
The brand value, captured by this approach, is the capitalised present value
of the future cash flows.
In developing a valuation approach that incorporates consumer behaviour a
metric has been developed that links marketing activities directly with
shareholder value; which raises the status of the marketing function and
which provides the company with a tool to measure return on marketing
investment and monitor the value of what in many cases is the firm's most
important asset.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:wits/oai:wiredspace.wits.ac.za:10539/17972 |
| Date | 11 June 2015 |
| Creators | Sinclair, Roger |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | application/pdf |
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