About The Book

"Value Creation - The Power of Brand Equity" is a framework for success that empowers CEOs, CFO’s, CMO’s, investors, and other stakeholders to better understand and manage their firm’s most valuable asset – their brands. This book vividly describes the role of values in the creation of value and how those values are communicated to the marketplace through brand performance.

When a firm’s values are in alignment with their brand’s promise, value is created in the form of brand equity, and that brand equity can be leveraged to drive sustainable competitive advantage and superior financial performance. Measurement and brand performance tracking are key. The authors demonstrate a measurement system that allows the brand owner to measure brand value and brand equity and diagnose a brand’s strengths and weaknesses in the marketplace.

As has been pointed out by several sources, including the authors, that current FASB accounting methods, on average, account for less than 25% of the value that willing buyers and sellers – the market, place on public firms. One only needs to compare a public firm’s book value to its market capitalization to understand just how much of the firm’s asset value is unaccounted for in their financial statements. Being blunt about it, current financial accounting methods do not measure the majority of a firm’s real value – what people are willing to pay for its ownership. Warren Buffet and other savvy investors understand this disparity and use all kinds of tools to try to find and unlock this “hidden” value.

These intangible assets add value by creating added revenues, in the form of margin and share and by avoiding opportunity costs (caused by employee turnover, constrained channels, etc.) It's the opportunity costs that most managers and accountants never account for because there is no generally accepted way of doing so.

What we have done is develop a measure of brand equity that can be directly converted to a dollars and cents economic value. That is, the total value of a branded offering has four major components - it's price, the value of the tangible performance attributes of the product or service, the value of the channel performance attributes of the product or service, and the value of the bundle of intangible attributes associated with the brand name - that is, its brand equity.

The implications of this model a very far reaching - encompassing firm financial management, new product development, human resources hiring & training, and of course brand management.

Ron Strauss and Bill Neal each bring 35+ years of 'in the trenches' marketing and marketing research observations and experiences with some of the world's leading companies. They distill that experience to explain

· The crucial link between firm values and brand performance

· How brand, an intangible asset, creates purpose and meaning, which translates into marketplace performance

· The critical difference between performance-based tangible and emotion-based intangible brand attributes

· How values impact performance, choice and loyalty

· The difference between brand integrity, brand promise, brand experience, values and value.

· The role of brand among employees, suppliers, investors and other stakeholders

· The role of the CEO and the CFO in brand management

· How value is created and/or destroyed on a daily basis

· The strong relationship between brand integrity and firm value

Their ideas and concepts are new and powerful, and are sure to stimulate much thought and discussion on the part of practitioners, academics and students. Best of all, they 'show' the reader how to improve performance in a way that is understandable and actionable.