If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it, Balanced Scorecard, Kaplan and Norton.

We know six criteria for successful online branding. But how do we know when online branding really is successful?  You can measure the value of a brand in some ways. The first way is Young and Rubicam’s Brands Assets Valuator (BAV). The Brand Asset Valuator is a database of consumer perception of brands created and managed by Brand Asset Consulting, a division of Young & Rubicam Brands to provide information to enable firms to improve the marketing decision-making process and to manage brands better.

BAV measures the value of a brand along four dimensions: “Differentiation,” “Relevance,” “Esteem,” and “Knowledge.” Differentiation and Relevance build up to “Brand Strength.” Esteem and Knowledge are used to calculate “Brand Stature.” BAV defines these terms as follows.

1. Differentiation – Differentiation is the ability for a brand to stand apart from its competitors. A brand should be as unique as possible. Brand health is built and maintained by offering a set of differentiating promises to consumers and delivering those promises to leverage value.

2. Relevance – Relevance is the actual and perceived importance of the brand to a large consumer market segment. This gauges the personal appropriateness of a brand to consumers and is strongly tied to household penetration (the percentage of households that purchase the brand).

3. Esteem – Esteem is the perceived quality and consumer perceptions about the growing or declining popularity of a brand. Does the brand keep its promises? The consumer’s response to a marketer’s brand-building activity is driven by his perception of two factors: quality and popularity, both of which vary by country and culture.

4. Knowledge –Knowledge is the extent of the consumer’s awareness of the brand and understanding of its identity.  The awareness levels about the brand and what it stands for shows the intimacy that consumers share with the brand. True knowledge of the brand comes through brand-building.

Differentiation and Relevance taken together say a lot about its growth potential (“Brand Vitality“), while Esteem and Knowledge determine the current power of a brand (“Brand Stature“).

BAV’s database is the result of the world’s most extensive research project on branding, based on data on 30,000 brands across 400,000 consumers in 48 countries through 240 studies.

Here’s an example of the BAV-tool that can be found on the internet:

You can see how to two companies B&O and Sony are valued by momentum and credibility. Both of them are very unique but in relevance, esteem and knowledge Sony wins.

Another way to measure the value of a brand is with BrandZ. BrandZ is a brand equity database. It holds data from over 650,000 consumers and professionals across 31 countries, comparing over 23,000 brands. The database is used to estimate brand valuations, and each year since 2006, has been used to generate a list of the top 100 global brands.

According to BrandZ,
“Brand value is the financial value of a brand defined as the sum of all earnings that a brand is expected to generate.

Strong brands have the power to create real and sustainable competitive advantage. They can:

• Drive revenue growth by ensuring higher demand and market share

• Help improve margins by commanding premium prices and better supplier terms

• Reduce capital requirements by minimizing the costs of entry into new categories
Strong brands can also create differentiation that allows companies to overcome commoditization and reduce overall business risk.”