You will lose brand equity value when no one is in charge of protecting the brand. This typically coincides with lack of awareness of brand value to the consumer and company. Even when the awareness and authority to protect your brand exists, brand evaluation must be based in a long term plan with goals for the brand. To justify your brand investment choices, you must have the ability to measure your goals against brand equity components below, as well as against indicators of business success. Finally, lack of or indifference to consumer / customer perceptions of a brand robs your company of the ability comprehend the brand today or in the future. Once a major retailer told me, "you know why I buy from XIKAR? Because you visit my stores!" Make sure you stay close to your customers!

Your sales promotion, a leak in your profit system, deserves its own mention. While you may have a temption or need to create short-term results, sales promotion isn't brand or equity building. In fact, since its easy to do, easy to copy and difficult to stop, sales promotion can quickly degrade you brand's perceived value and it's profits rather quickly. After all, "small leaks sink big ships". Instead, rather than cutting activities that focus on short term results, use the assets and skills over your entire organization to build the brand. Get creative with promotions not involving price (such as contests). And measure your brand value by gross margin which shows the deleterious effects of sales promotion. Is it going down? If so, you have a pricing problem.

In 1999 Scott Almsberger and I received a patent on our revolutionary cigar cutter. In 2014, the US Patent and Trademark office declared the design "iconic" by granting a trademark to the shape itself. In order to achieve this distinction, we had to prove the product shape was iconic - or identifiable without any other brand or trade marks. Over ninety percent of the thousands of customers and consumers surveyed correctly identified the rendering at the left as a "XIKAR Cutter"!

Brand awareness requires constant marketing messages, in a combination of advertising, public relations, company newsletters and service. Top of mind Brand awareness is all about Trust. In my Management page, you'll see how consistency of process can be an incredibly powerful tool to build trust. But how does awareness contribute to trust? People are comfortable with the familiar and associate that familiarity with quality and reliability. Experience and crowd effect deepens familiarity, from Awareness to Familiar (tried brand) to Top of Mind (seeking brand). Thus put your band in front of customers, on line, in stores and and in their hands and minds. Back up those touch-points with positive experiences and you will build your brand from awareness to loyalty.

The mind is a predictive tool, and people seek to predict experiences through attributions of quality (or lack thereof) by association with a brand. "You are known by the company you keep", including the place where your brand is sold, it's position on the shelf, the location and styling of advertisements, even the design of the packaging, website, etc. Associations with people - endorsements or group popularity through testimonials might be the most powerful associations which contribute to positive brand perception. Therefore your marketing should focus heavily on positive messaging and approval ratings from others.

Perceived quality IS quality to your consumer, even if they don't know the specifications of your product. Imagine trying to understand the makeup of everything we bought. Instead, we very often depend on the location of the sale, the experience of others, their validation on social media and other queues to indicate quality. After the sale, the actual quality of the product or service must stand up to its promise. Good news: people are forgiving, and even when there is a product quality problem, consumers allow brands to overcome that through a warranty with consistently great service.

Brand awareness, associations, perceived quality and product experience are the most powerful contributors to brand loyalty. They give your company momentum - which in turn ads to a price premium for your product, lower dependence on promotion, and a longer time-frame for innovation and defense of competition. You can measure brand loyalty through your repeat purchases, distribuition coverage, brand share and gross margin growth.

When you think of your brand in terms of assets and skills, you then begin to orient your approach toward long-term outcomes in brand strength. Assets include names, icons, art and and design, and also include trade relationships (vendors and customers) patents and other intellectual property. Your skills, the things you do better than your competitors, set you apart. Those skills, executed well and in conjunction with your promises, set you above, way above. We weren't the only company in the cigar trade with a lifetime warranty - we were the one who executed our police the best, so well in fact that eventually we said and lived that we gurantee everything we "say, sell and do."

Measurable components of brand value include a price premium you are able to obtain when consumers prefer your brand, and the related protection to withstand price competition from competitors. Even when the four P's of Marketing are relatively similar, a powerful brand will create purchase preference for your product. Finally and perhaps most importantly, a great brand considerably increases your equity value (multiple of income) on the sale of your company!