Increasing Brand Value:
A Masterclass from the World's Strongest Brands
By Anastasia Kourovskaia, Vice President of Millward Brown Optimor

A brand is an intangible yet powerful corporate asset. Merlin Entertainment’s recent flotation and Twitter’s IPO have both highlighted the impact of strong branding and marketing on a successful listing and a share price that soars. Like any asset, a brand needs to be understood, maintained and invested in – and by measuring a brand’s value a company can quantify exactly how much it contributes to revenues and growth, and develop strategies to manage it better.
Looking at the strongest brands in the BrandZ™ Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands ranking across the last eight years, Anastasia Kourovskaia, Vice President of Millward Brown Optimor, shares the common factors that have enabled them to build long-term brand value.
It is widely acknowledged that strong brands enable businesses to generate a sales volume and price premium that improves revenues and margins, attract and retain the best employees and facilitate expansion into new products and markets. Analysis by Millward Brown Optimor shows that investment in strong brands lead to consistently higher share prices. Companies with strong brands also lose value less precipitously in a recession, and emerge with a sustainable competitive advantage.
This makes understanding how much business value is driven by a brand critical for marketers. Brand valuation quantifies the financial value that brand and marketing create in the business through their impact on the customer purchase decision. It plays a key part in measuring the effectiveness of brand strategy and marketing initiatives, and provides useful insights into strengths, weaknesses and opportunities.
Through studying its BrandZ database Millward Brown has identified the brands that have built the most brand value over