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Marketing decisions create intangible assets. In the absence of formal intangible asset value reporting structures, the stock analyst acts as an independent valuation source who provides seemingly objective assessments of the shareholder value of a firm's intangible assets. Drawing on qualitative data from in-depth interviews with stock analysts, the authors investigate a series of antecedent factors that affect the accuracy of the stock analyst's assessment of intangible assets. The study collates these observations into several propositions that may serve as a basis for further research.

Proponents of the resource-based view (RBV) of the firm point to the important role of assets in general and of intangible assets in particular (e.g., Barney, 1986, Barney, 1995, Conner and Prahalad, 1996, Grant, 1991 and Hall, 1993). Intangible assets can comprise the majority of a firm's total assets (Doyle, 2000), are important contributors to shareholder value (Gupta et al., 2004), and provide a sustainable source of wealth creation (Riahi-Belkaoui, 2003). Intangible assets include brands, customer relationships, and market knowledge. The RBV suggests that intangible assets may be powerful sources of competitive advantage because rival firms cannot easily comprehend, evaluate, and imitate them. Intangible assets are also difficult to measure. The accounting profession struggles with the task of determining the financial value of intangible assets (Lev, 2001). Consequently, the more intangible-dominant the firm, the more likely its financial reports do not reflect the full potential of the firm's future returns on investment (see Choi et al., 2000). Generally, each firm has the responsibility to measure and report upon the value of its intangibles. Because of the lack of regulated reporting controls (Guthrie and Petty, 2000), disclosure by firms of the perceived value of intangibles is irregular (Ambler et al., 2001), subjective (Backhuijs et al., 1999), selective (Wyatt, 2002), and informal (Stolowy and Jeny-Cazavan, 2001). Over-valuation of intangible assets was the principal cause of corporate crashes such as WorldCom and Enron in the USA, and HIH and One.Tel in Australia. Investor reaction to these unexpected crashes indicates an urgent need for investors to receive more accurate information about the nature and value of firms' intangible assets (Lim and Dallimore, 2002). Because intangible assets are complex and difficult to measure (Srivastava et al., 1998), challenges exist not only for investors but also for the stock analysts who advise them. The role of stock analysts is a critical one: evaluating the tangible and intangible assets of firms and then making recommendations to investors based on their evaluations. The more accurately stock analysts evaluate a firm's intangible assets, the more likely they facilitate informed decision-making by investors by providing an accurate assessment of a key influencer of shareholder value. Stock analysts present themselves to investors as independent, impartial, and expert, yet little is known about how analysts deal with the challenge of assessing intangibles. This paper aims to understand the factors that can influence the accuracy of stock analysts' assessment of the shareholder value of intangible firm assets. On the basis of qualitative data derived from in-depth interviews with 63 stock analysts, the paper integrates these factors into five propositions. This study is important for the marketing discipline because intangibles often relate to marketing (McLaughlin, 2003). A growing theoretical literature shows that marketing assets provide a substantial contribution to shareholder value. However, what is not known is how, whether, and to what extent, stock analysts understand the contribution of marketing intangibles to shareholder value. This issue is part of a broader question, namely, how do those external to the organization value the contribution of marketing, broadly defined, to the organization's future prosperity? This study also sheds light on the thought processes of stock analysts, and how they conceptualize intangibles and determine the relative contribution of intangibles to future shareholder value vis a vis tangibles. This article begins by defining key terms, outlining the stock analyst's role, and presenting the methodology used. Subsequently, the article merges insights from the extant literature and from in-depth interviews with stock analysts to develop several propositions relating to analysts' assessments of intangible assets. Finally, the article provides guidelines for future research and discusses the implications of the propositional framework.

The analyst's challenge is not only to identify and assess the intangible assets of the firm, but to determine the likely contribution of intangible assets to the firm in dealing with a changing external environment. Barney (1995), one of the foremost proponents of the RBV, points to the need to integrate internal with external environmental analyses when evaluating the competitive advantage of firms. Recall that the first of the four questions referred to earlier asks whether a firm's resources and capabilities add value by enabling the firm to exploit opportunities and/or neutralize threats. The external environment provides these opportunities and threats. The analyst, to this end, must have a good understanding of the external environment and must try to anticipate changes in the environment because it is inherently dynamic. In making a recommendation to investors, the analyst necessarily makes an assessment of the future (Bruce, 2002). An accurate assessment of the value of intangibles must, therefore, incorporate a dynamic aspect and an understanding of the sources of change. An individual firm exists in a given market environment, and, hence, the value of the firm's intangible assets is affected by external factors such as technological change and changes in customer preferences and competition. A change in the external environment necessarily leads to a change in the importance of intangibles relative to other generators of wealth. For example, the relative importance of intangibles in the petroleum sector is presently low, but intangibles will become more important in the future because the increasing difficulty of accessing new reserves makes firms more dependent on exploration and research capabilities. Changes in the external environment also have an effect on the relative importance of the components making up the firm's total intangible assets. The dynamic nature of the external environment suggests that the accuracy of assessments depends partly on the analyst's capacity for foresight (see Morrin et al., 2002) which, in turn, is principally about factoring-in the impact on intangibles of expected changes in the external environment. The survey evidence suggests, however, that many analysts lack foresight and tend to have a very narrow conceptualization of the external environment. Observers of environmental trends suggest that the late 20th and early 21st centuries witnessed the arrival of a fundamentally different business environment (see Child, 2005 for a summary), characterized by globalization, a host of new technologies, a knowledge-based society, hypercompetition in many industries, and new expectations by society of the role of business. Competition is no longer purely local and the traditional boundaries between industries are dissolving. These characteristics suggest, in turn, that the analyst's ability to analyze the interaction between a firm's internal and external environments will be stronger when the analyst takes a broader, rather than narrower, view of the external environment in which the firm operates. Peteraf and Bergen (2003, p. 1039) support this contention when they refer to the “natural myopia” of managers, a phrase that applies equally well to analysts. Managers and analysts alike need to have “an expansive view of the competitive terrain” (Peteraf and Bergen, 2003, p. 1039). Analysts with better informed views of the competitive terrain in particular, and of the external environment generally, are likely to have more accurate assessments of intangibles.