Rethinking where brand sits in the hierarchy of business decisions.
Ask most boards where brand sits and they’ll point at the marketing budget. It’s a line item, owned by the marketing team, counted in campaigns and reach.
When a company is being readied for sale, brand tends to turn up late, somewhere near the data room, treated as presentation rather than substance.
The reasoning feels sound enough. Marketing owns the logo, the website and the messaging, so marketing owns the brand.
Treated as marketing, brand decorates a business. Treated as a board decision, it directs one.
Brand isn’t a marketing cost. It’s one of the few things that moves enterprise value, and it almost never gets to do that job because of where it’s filed. Park brand inside marketing and it can only ever do a marketing task. It dresses the business. It doesn’t help decide where the business is going. The moment brand actually creates worth is when it’s treated as a board matter – when it shapes the direction of the company, not just how the company looks getting there. That’s a different thing entirely, and far rarer than it should be. A good logo has never once changed the price of a business. A clear sense of where that business is going changes it every time.
The reason is plain once you see it. A sale price is a bet on the future, not a receipt for the past. Show a buyer a business that knows where it’s going, and runs as though it believes it, and you take risk out of their sums. Less risk buys a higher multiple. The advisers who handle this properly reckon it adds a few per cent to enterprise value on a trade sale, and more again on a flotation. A few per cent reads like a rounding error until you set it against the whole price. On most deals it’s the number nobody went looking for.
Four situations are where this earns its keep, and they come round again and again. In a merger, a shared story is what turns two firms under one roof into a single company that behaves like one. In a carve-out, the new identity has to carry a new commercial plan, not just a new badge over the old business. On the marketing side, real savings sit untouched long after the obvious cost cuts have been pocketed. And there are the intangible assets, the part of the price a buyer pays to inherit and keeps on the books once the deal closes. It’s rarely the first move an owner thinks of. It should be among the earliest.
So why, with the gain this obvious, does almost nobody collect? Because brand belongs to no one. Finance files it under soft and unmeasurable. The studio treats the commercial case as somebody else’s worry. The one job that needs an accountant and a creative at the same table gets neither, and the money sits in the gap between them. Put the two in a room from the outset and it shows up in the price. Keep them apart and it never shows up at all.
The fix is mostly timing. Put brand on the table when you write the investment case, not when the sale is already in sight. Leave it to the final year and all you can do is tidy the story. Start on day one and you can change what the story is about. Buyers can tell which one they’re looking at, and they price it accordingly.
Brand has been sitting in the wrong budget for years. It was always a boardroom decision.
