The real value of brand building

People often seem to struggle with valuing brands, and brand-building activities.

Here’s how to value them:

Bank accounts holds money. “Making bank” means accruing money.

Brands holds relational equity with a community. “Building brand” means accruing relational equity with a community.

A bank account without a positive balance is worth $0, tops. Same goes for a brand that doesn’t carry a positive balance in relational equity with the community it exists to serve.

If you make an Ask, you spend that equity. If the Ask pays off, you get it back.

Sales is hard if you attempt to transact with no balance. Sales is easy if you have a positive balance to spend from.

Growth is easy if you get a return on equity invested. You get that return by spending it on an ask that pays off for the buyer, because they’ll re-deposit their relational equity with interest.

With this in mind, brand building isn’t at odds with revenue generation… it’s the force multiplier to your revenue generation goals you wish you had but couldn’t see, because you hadn’t defined “brand” the right way. You may have been measuring the container (0) not the balance ($$$).

Short-termism might suggest valuing business development based on a quarterly scope… where brand building sounds like a fluffy distraction.

But if you can look beyond the quarter, you might find that brand development is the silver bullet you’ve been looking for all along.