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According to one industry pro, “The gap between marketing and finance has never been greater.” His solution? Make “brand” a balance sheet item.
While I absolutely agree that too many companies do too little to “quantify the elusive qualitative” (as one of my colleagues is known to say), I have a hard time pumping my fist in the air a la Bobby Seale and a letting loose a rebel yell of support.
Yes, “brand equity” (or whatever overused, buzzword gobbledgook you prefer) is an important intangible asset. But so is management credibility. And so is your “vitality index” that measures revenues from new products over the past five years. And don’t forget your patents or your three-year growth strategy or your… well… you get the point.
Do you need more brand in your IR diet? Highly likely. Research continues to show that up to 50 percent (if not more) of valuation comes from such intangible assets. Do we need to need to add it to your balance sheet as suggested? I wouldn’t.
I think there’s a simpler solution that is much less invasive and significantly easier to implement - let investor relations do what it is intended to do by serving as both a compliance function (to report the financial results) and a marketing function (to report on intangibles assets). By allowing IROs to design and implement a fully formed, dual purpose IR program, I suspect the aforementioned marketing-finance gap will all but disappear.
Do you see it differently?
I don’t know about you, but the last two weeks have been a blur. No, not because of the Olympics but because it’s that wonderful time of year when year-end earnings drafting collides with annual report development which bumps into proxy preparations and the return of the non-deal road show.
So, forgive me, I need to circle back to something that came out a little while back. I thought this piece from the IR Alert offered an interesting takeaway from the Olympics - and big dollar corporate sponsorships in general. One of the most telling parts of this interview was how Jack Carsky (head of global IR for Visa) responded to the question about measuring success of such sponsorships: “Not much of this [bump] has to do with IR—but it’s just nice to draft off of them (marketing and advertising). Plus, all of Wall Street sees those ads and so do our analysts. You can’t look at any Olympic venue on TV right now and not see our name on it. So it does have impact.”
What’s caught my eye about this quote is what he didn’t say. First, he didn’t specifically mention how important “brand” is as intangible asset to the company but clearly it must be or how could brand marketing and advertising create any “draft” for the valuation. I wonder why he didn’t talk more about branding and valuation? Second, he didn’t specifically mention the impact such branding has on the company’s appeal to retail investors, though in this interview he did say, “... anything that advances value or your brand and a wider understanding of the company and what you do, can only make the IRO’s job easier.” Maybe I didn’t I missed it but I didn’t see any substantive discussion on the retail community, which is odd given that roughly 50 percent of Visa is held by retail investors.
One other Olympics-related topic that confused me - what, exactly, are the rules to curling!??! It seemed to be the only event on whenever I tried to watch and, as hard as I tried, I could not break the code on the objective/scoring for the sport.
