Brand Finance launches Brand Rating system

Having launched its annual brand league table, listing Sri Lanka’s most valuable brands, the company is now offering to provide a detailed analysis around those brands.

The annual league tables which were published in the April issue of LMD, consists of a brand value and a brand rating table. “In order to put these valuation numbers and ratings in proper perspective, we have made significant investments in market research and have done an immense amount of analysis. A small part of this can be found in our articles in LMD, but there is much more” said Ruchi Gunewardene, Managing Director of Brand Finance Lanka. “We now intend to engage with those companies and share this independent analysis with them. This programme leads to verifying the brand rating that we have given them.”

A brand rating is like a company credit rating, which provides investors with the future outlook for the brand. “In the case of a brand rating, it provides an indication of the role and strength of the brand in relation to its ability to attract future revenue for the business” said Gunewardene. A valuation, on the other hand, is the value of the brand at a given point in time. The brand rating is therefore a dynamic, strategic tool which can be used to impact the value of the brand and therefore the value of the business.

Last year several companies reviewed this information and ratified their brand ratings and were presented with a certification from Brand Finance UK.

“Brand Finance’s focus in the Sri Lankan market is to make such investments in order to create a much greater appreciation on how companies can quantify their performances by linking marketing actions to financial performance. For too long, marketing has been considered a black box, which involves allocating funds for advertising and promotional purposes with very little accountability. At its best, we find that many companies merely track consumer awareness or preference or other such indices as an outcome. But this is not what is important at the boardroom level. The Board of Directors wants to know the financial implications of the activities that have been undertaken. Brand Finance, as its name aptly describes, actually links the marketing metrics with financial results.”

“Depending on the complexity of the business, we have various tools to track and monitor this. One such tool is the brand scorecard, which tracks the various business inputs to financial output numbers. Brand Finance Singapore, for example, implemented such a system for the Malaysian Oil Company Petronas” said Gunewardene.

“Because Brand Finance Lanka is a part of the global network of offices located in India, Canada, Australia, Singapore, amongst others, we can tap into these to source the required expertise. So, from providing simple local solutions like the brand rating, to setting up more complex tracking systems such as scorecards, we can always modify our solutions based on the available budget” concluded Gunewardene.