ارزش ویژه برند و ارزش سهامدار

It is often assumed that brands represent an asset, as well as a source of current and future earnings and cash flows for a firm. As such, the value of the brand, or brand equity, should manifest itself in the market value of the firm and thus have an impact on shareholder value. Yet, almost no research exists that has empirically investigated this relationship between brand value and shareholder value. In the present study, brand equity is measured for 43 Dutch corporate brands using the Brand Asset Valuator® for the years 1993 and 1997. Directional changes within the BAV Power Grid, measuring Brand Strength and Brand Stature, are statistically compared with directional changes in shareholder value between 1993 and 1997. Three different measures for determining shareholder value are used: Total Shareholder Return, Earnings per Share, and the Market-to-Book ratio. Various indications are found that confirm the expected relationships, but a clear need is observed to develop reliable and valid indicators for shareholder value. Some managerial implications, limitations of the study and directions for future research are discussed.

Typically, brands are considered intangible corporate assets. It is often suggested that they possess economic value and create wealth for the company’s shareholders (Aaker, 1996, Doyle, 2001 and Kerin and Sethuraman, 1998). However, publications providing empirical evidence for the relationship between brand equity and shareholder value are exceedingly scarce. Still, according to Kerin and Sethuraman (1998), the conceptual arguments for the existence of such a relationship are compelling enough to suggest that this linkage justifies further attention. However, they conclude that: ‘a conclusive linkage between brand value and shareholder value has yet to be established’ (Kerin and Sethuraman, 1998, p. 271). In this paper, we attempt to provide some new evidence for the link between brand equity, measured using the Brand Asset Valuator® (BAV®) model (Young and Rubicam, 2000), and shareholder value, that was measured using Total Shareholder Return, Earnings Per Share, and the Market-to-Book ratio. To our knowledge, this is the first time that the BAV® is used to study the relationship between brand equity and shareholder value, while using three different indicators for shareholder value. 1.1. Background Intuitively, one would expect brand equity to influence the market value of a firm (Doyle, 2001). However, little is known about whether investors actually value the effects of brand equity as reflected in the stock price. Finance and marketing are usually viewed as two separate entities within organizations and little attention has been paid to the effect of marketing decisions on the value of a company (Kerin and Sethuraman, 1998). Although this often resulted in separate academic research agendas, a few studies have been carried out on stock market reactions to brand extension announcements, customer service changes and product errors (Lane and Jacobson, 1995, Nayyar, 1995 and Pahud de Mortanges and Tourani Rad, 1998). Kerin and Sethuraman (1998) conducted a first empirical study investigating the relationship between brand equity and shareholder value for US-based consumer goods companies. In their study the (mostly finance-based) Interbrand method was employed, using secondary sources (data were extracted from the Financial World). The market-to-book value of the company was used as a single indicator for shareholder value. Using this approach, a positive (albeit weak) relationship between brand equity and shareholder value was found.

The above shows that it is indeed possible to obtain indications of changes in brand equity and demonstrate that the performance (in terms of ‘Strength’ and ‘Stature’) of a brand may have significant impact on the value of a firm. These findings are consistent with the premise that the purpose of marketing is not only to create value for the company’s customers, but that this has to result in creating value for its owners (i.e. the shareholders) as well. A reliable instrument should make it possible to hold marketers in general, and brand managers in particular, accountable for the financial implications of their strategies, especially in terms of shareholder value. Focusing more closely on monitoring brand equity and shareholder value in a frequent and consistent manner will forge a much-desired closer cooperation between marketing and finance professionals within a firm. A number of limitations are associated with this study. First, the relationships we found do not appear to occur consistently and seem to depend strongly on the measures employed to determine shareholder value. This points at the need to develop a valid and reliable measurement instrument for the various dimensions of the shareholder value construct. Second, the relationships we found are relatively weak and asymmetrical. This is in the first place due to limitations with respect to the size and heterogeneity our sample. The criteria used to select the participating companies resulted in a rather unbalanced sample, including a relatively large share of companies that had increased their value in the 1993–1997 period. This is partially due to the fact that changes in value were not corrected for changes in overall stock exchange performance, or industry specific performance indices. More research will therefore be needed to investigate the hypothesized relationships in various industry sectors. This study was also limited to investigating a relationship between the direction of the change in brand equity and the corresponding directional change in shareholder value, and not the magnitude of those changes. In order to determine the effects of investments in marketing strategies more precisely, further research efforts should be devoted to the investigation of correlations between the changes.