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Tag: E-Trade

  • Is Your Brand Identity Worth Billions?

    Is your brand valuation worth a billion dollars today? Maybe yes or maybe no, but it surely is worth something pretty big. At the end of the day, all the work you have put in pushing your name identity and your range of products and services in your marketplace adds up in an abstract space of the consumer’s mind, where it acquires some great value. This equity can be measured as a real, soft asset. It can have a monetary value like that of a certain type of goodwill or particular reputation. Brand identity is something you might not use to pay the bills but can surely use to negotiate a better price in an M&A or sale of the company.

    To measure the value, there are many rules, mostly according to the sales volume and how it has increased over the years, monies spent in promotion and advertising, and how the brand has climbed and at what rate. There also are many other factors, like financial performance, customer perceptions and actual market share.

    Published Figures
    Most valuations are in billions of dollars; otherwise they don’t get media attention. Most top brands of any country are often valued in tens of billions of dollars, and unless you gather a team of forensic accountants, there is no way to prove it wrong or to challenge how a US$50 billion brand value slipped to $25 billion and vice versa.

    Most high-profile valuations are done without any input from the management and the owners of the brands, as it is done from published figures. Sometimes brand owners get pretty upset as they are moved seemingly arbitrarily up and down the scale against their competitors.

    Normally, year after year, Coke, IBM, Microsoft, Disney, Toyota and Gillette are given a combined value of close to half a trillion dollars.

    Most people would think that if Coke were to restart its entire branding history, it would easily cost a trillion dollars, as the company marshaled a global country-by-country marketing and branding launch in a bid to repeat its branding success. The brand valuation of Coke is over $50 billion or so, but somehow the total stock value of Coke is still about $40 billion. Strange math.

    Let’s explore reality.

    Brand Name Dilution
    A globally protected unique brand with a unique name identity and steady sales growth can be valued by multiplying annual sales a few times, adding in all the advertising and promotional costs spent on that brand from its inception, and adding in expected sales and the value of each client spread over years. From that, subtract some key things, like competition, lawsuits and other risks, such as possibly losing ownership claim to the brand name and so on. The bottom line is that you might easily end up with a billion dollar number.

    Certain things are very tangible and black and white, such as the brand name and its ownership; simply put, either you own this name outright or you don’t. Most managers try hard to convince themselves that their single trademark filed in the country of origin is sufficient. They ignore the global e-commerce reality. Most CEOs are simply shy to check the dilution of their brand names on Google.Because less than 1 percent of names are globally protected, the chance is that the entire evaluation is on shaky ground. During any M&A, a price is established on hard and soft assets. Brand valuation is really a soft asset, as opposed to trademarks and intellectual property, which are hard assets.

    Imagine, Amazon without its globally protected name identity and URL is just a warehouse with books. E-trade is just an office. What about EBay or Google? The message should be pretty clear.

    Recommendations
    Management should formulate a small committee and take a quick inventory of issues to calculate some brand value numbers. As long as the resulting valuations are a few times over total stock value, you are doing OK. However, if for some reason it is way less than total assets, then you need to figure out all about your branding and the real issues surrounding the ownership of the brands, names, trademarks and URLs, etc.

    Today, branding correctly with the right image and a universal name identity is still a very easy thing to do. All it requires is the right skills. However, the old mass-advertising model is dead. Now, one-to-one marketing offers extremely unique opportunities to become a viable brand with the smallest budget in the shortest time. Apply the correct expertise and correct methodologies. Old models are dead.

    If for some reason your brand is not worth a billion dollars, start the right image development process today. It won’t take long. Just go for the new rules and new laws of creating billion dollar brand name identities. It is very easy.

     

  • Google Phenomenon Critical to Corporate Identity

    Today’s hot topic is Google and the search-engine ranking of brand identities. All businesses, whether big or small, are trying to dominate the accessibility of their corporate identity, images and brand names, mostly via cyber mediums, fluid Web sites, new cyber branding and digital domain name management techniques.

    For this reason, cyber-image corporations like Yahoo, Amazon, E-Trade, Google, eBay, and millions of others successful operations worldwide do not conjure up the images of overpowering logos on skyscrapers, specific logo designs with color identities, taglines with gigantic billboards or repetitive visual advertising campaigns. Rather, they are almost invisible in the traditional corporate identity arena.

    These newly emerging cyber giants are quietly working and residing in our laptops and other gadgets snug and warm in our pockets. And who knows if these are the same companies that crawl out from our computers in the middle of the night and wash up our dishes, too. Today, corporate accessibility is built for global cyber economies using search-engine techniques as a new standard because it is fast, user friendly and extremely cheap.

    Bigger Image Seems Sluggish
    Big business images of the past were of status- and symbol-driven corporations projecting their powers. They plastered their names and logos at every corner, offered a limited-access, 9-to-5, Monday-through-Friday format while appearing formal, boring and, at times, unaffordable.

    But in cyber-identity domination, a corporation provides interactive, 24-7, user-friendly service that focuses on being extremely economical and on constantly emulating a corporate presence in a viral formation. Today, the bigger the image, the more sluggish, complicated and unreliable it appears.

     

    Cyber corporations, under the new rules, are developing sophisticated Web presence and working on global portalization of the entire corporation. In this major shift, there is a serious decline of the traditional collateral material that corporations produced under the old rules of corporate identities, intricate bulky brochures, thick catalogues and colorful annual reports.

    Rather, all imaging and information is being transferred to user-friendly, sophisticated, fluid sites — where information changes constantly and services are available at bullet speed. Corporations that are small, agile and have open access are now the winners.

    Custom Information

    Corporations practicing the old corporate identity rules were absolutely convinced that the entire globe was their potential target audience. In every instance, these corporations used general broadcast and shotgun methods to relay their messages — including skyscrapers, billboards and bulky brochures, all addressing the “global occupant.”

    Now, cyber domination provides custom information to a select, potential client base located in specific demographics worldwide. The message is highly pertinent, clear, precise and user-friendly, offering instant results. Selected and targeted messages get the results.

    In the old strategy, the key to success was in the total graphic image. The name of a corporation was not the key issue, but rather a part of an advertising jigsaw puzzle. All the emphasis was placed on the visuals: logos, specific colors and graphic designs, tag lines and other paraphernalia, to create a total visual-identity experience. Names were treated as a small hip-hop exercise, something to be dragged to success by a big and expensive blowout campaign. Hence branding needed huge budgets. Now that a new reality has set in it has become imperative that a name must be highly functional on its own and would not require a bottomless pit. Good names work and climb own their own in cyber-branding. They have a upward or a downward mobility of their own. Ad spending can assist just a bit but cannot save a downward slide.

    The rule of cyber domination is very different. It all boils down to a powerful name that makes for a powerful URL, which is then used as a key to find and unlock the Web site in a complex global maze. It is all based on how well you can remember the name, how easily you can type it, how to find the corporation right up front on a search engine, and how to get instant accessibility and long-term visibility.

    Why traditional print and design-driven branding is dying.

     

    This is a very big change, all over the world and has created a noticeable shift in how companies build global corporate images in cyber space. This shift also explains the sudden meltdown in traditional advertising agencies, as well as advertisers’ confusion regarding cyber marketing. In today’s corporate world, the key to success, or the “magic,” clearly lies in the name — a URL to set the company apart in the global e-commerce arena. Let’s face it. When a name cannot be found easily on the Internet, the corporation is no longer in cyber domination — rather, it is in cyber oblivion.

     

    Symptoms of cyber oblivion include when a name is lost in the crowd and doesn’t ring cash registers; when a name is too old fashioned and doesn’t convey today’s dynamics; when the spelling of a name requires a higher IQ or more money is spent in explaining the origin of the name; when a corporation does not own a trademark or an identical dot-com name; when the name is embarrassing in certain countries; when the name is too long, too difficult, too confusing, too complicated. All or any of the above will simply sink great projects, great ideas and keep the corporate branding in oblivion.