Brand value: What it is and how to build and measure it

As a marketer, you’ve probably invested a lot of time, energy, and budget into your brand—but is it reflected in your brand value? Can you actually put a price on how much your brand is worth?

Your brand value is entwined with your overall brand health. That’s why it pays to not just understand brand value, but also prioritize it. 

In this article, we’ll explain how marketers can measure and improve brand value and collect insights to strengthen strategies and boost their business. 

Brand value is the financial worth of your brand. In other words, if you were going to sell your brand today, including its name, logo, colors, packaging, digital assets, and brand identity, how much would someone pay to purchase it? 

Your brand value reflects the strength of your company’s brand and brand equity and your overall brand health. And in today’s increasingly crowded marketplace, that matters.

Brand names influence whether consumers purchase, get emotionally invested, and stay loyal. Brand value shows that, essentially, you can put a price on positive brand performance.

What’s the difference between brand value and brand equity? It’s hard to talk about one without talking about the other, but there are distinctions you should know. 

Brand value is the financial measure of your brand’s worth, summed up in a number. For example, as of March 2025, Apple’s brand value was determined to be $574 billion.  

Brand equity, on the other hand, isn’t quite as tangible. It has to do with customers’ perceptions of your brand, and whether positive perceptions have an impact on your brand performance and your business. 

Unlike brand value, your brand equity isn’t a single, hard number. Because of this, it’s generally harder to measure—but it does contribute to your brand value.

For example, let’s say you were looking to take over the Heinz brand. Your bid would need to consider more than just the value of tasty condiment recipes and the actual Heinz products. You’d also be purchasing the hallmarks of the brand (Heinz’s name, logo, and brand elements) and the brand equity that comes with them.

Heinz has positive brand equity, so customer loyalty is high, and people are willing to pay a higher price for its products. This boosts its brand value and would be a significant factor in its hypothetical sale. 

Is there a secret sauce or magic formula that makes a brand valuable? Not exactly. But valuable brands do tend to have these traits:

Valuable brands are household names that people know and talk about. They can be spotted in a lineup of other brands on the market and even have high unaided brand awareness.

People have a favorable perception of these brands and habitually turn to them when they go to make a purchase.

From their products to their customer service, these brands have proven that they deliver the goods. They’ve made a name for themselves and cultivated happy customers. 

These brands are clear on the value they offer their customers and the brand attributes that set them apart. Plus, they make a compelling case for why they’re better than their competitors.

Success story: How Brex uses research to add proof to its value proposition

These brands are known for products and services that are worth consumers’ time and money.

These brands have unlocked how to get people emotionally-invested in their offerings, creating connections rather than just one-off transactions. 

Business is good; these brands are meeting or exceeding financial goals and investing in strategies with high ROI.

From ad campaigns to social posts, these brands are crafting stories and experiences that are compelling and authentic.

Knowing your brand value can help you shape your marketing strategy and understand your brand health. Measuring brand value isn't an exact science, but it is an important exercise—and brand value can be estimated even if you're not planning to sell your brand.

There are several ways to measure brand value. Each approach will spark different results and collect different metrics that can inform your brand strategy.

A market-based valuation uses the overall climate of your market to define your brand’s value. Essentially, you figure out your brand value based on the value of similar brands on the market with comparable brand rights, stock performance, and assets.

If a brand like Coca-Cola took this approach, it might calculate brand value by looking at the value of similar brands like PepsiCo., Unilever, or Nestlé.

In this method, you need to calculate all the costs spent on creating and developing your brand, using data on all of your expenses from inception to the present. Expenses include ad spend, marketing costs, employee salaries, contractor salaries, trademarks, and any other costs associated with establishing your brand. 

It’s important to note that a cost-based valuation will give you a clear picture of what you’ve invested, but it doesn’t take your brand equity into account—so this may only give you a partial picture of your brand value.

Focus on the financial streams, such as income, cash flow, cost savings, and future revenues, to determine your income-based valuation. But as you’re gathering the numbers, note which ones are the result of your brand reputation and awareness. This gives you a frame of reference for some of the less tangible assets of your brand.

Your NPS score predicts whether your customers will promote your brand. Start by sending an online NPS survey to your current customer list to determine how likely they are to recommend your brand. This measures how much people know, like, and trust your brand.

Success story: How Point of Reference maximizes NPS feedback

Brand awareness, brand perception, customer satisfaction, and brand loyalty surveys are excellent ways to measure your brand equity. You may already have some of these surveys in place. If not, a brand awareness survey can measure several of these brand metrics at once, saving you time and effort.

Success story: How Ryanair collects CSAT insights at scale

Keep in mind that determining your brand value is more complex than, say, finding the value of your car. You may find that one of these approaches suits your needs best, or that a combination of methods and metrics gives you a more complete view of your brand value.

Whether you want to position your brand in the best light for an acquisition or understand your brand loyalty and health, building brand value is a worthy goal for any marketer or business leader. And the good news is that what’s good for your brand value is good for your brand health!

Here are some actionable steps you can take to build up your brand value:

If your brand is getting lost on the shelves, is murky in consumers’ minds, or isn’t memorable, it won’t benefit your brand value. Focus on establishing or refining your brand identity—if you need guidance, use data from our expert-written Brand Health Tracking Survey Templates to pinpoint where to focus.

And don’t forget, all your brand identity work shouldn’t get siloed to your marketing team. Ensure that employees across your organization are clear on who you are and how to present your brand by presenting brand loyalty insights widely, explaining branding strategies, and checking up on their understanding with surveys.

Your brand has a personality. That personality is what makes your prospective customers remember you. Use the same tone, language, and style throughout your communications and channels, from your blogs and web content to your emails and social media posts.

This gives your brand a cohesive and recognizable identity and helps ensure that you’re showing up with intention, no matter where customers start their journey with you.

Building a reputation for high-quality products or services isn’t just good for business—it’s good for your brand. Once people view your brand as reliable, they’re more likely to buy from it, return to it, and spread the word about it.

Make it a point to collect product feedback—and act on it. Find out what customers like and dislike and craft your product roadmap based on their opinions and experiences. This will take the guesswork out of figuring out what brand offerings will appeal most to your customers. And if you show that you’re really listening, you’ll send a clear message that your customers’ feedback matters.

Success story: How Together Labs boosts product development with user feedback

Another great boost for your brand reputation is to be known for your customer experience. Prioritize customer touchpoint improvements, set goals with data from a customer satisfaction survey, and work on nurturing relationships that make your brand stand out.  

If you're not clear on the story you’re telling, consumers won’t be either. Consider all the ways you’re telling your brand story, including your brand voice, customer testimonials, ads, brand mission, and web pages. 

When in doubt, check in with your target audience and make a point to measure brand affinity. A message testing survey will uncover whether your storytelling is hitting the mark. Similarly, a solution like SurveyMonkey ad testing can help you measure the effectiveness of ad creative, including copy, before you go live. 

You can’t have significant brand value without good brand awareness, a.k.a the extent to which consumers are familiar with your product or service. 

Conduct regular research with a Brand Awareness Survey Template to get a true measure of your brand’s popularity. Use those insights to clarify your market position and set improvement goals.

Today’s consumers don’t have time or patience for brands that aren’t open, genuine, and accessible—and they’re one click away from double-checking your claims or posting a negative review that will scare people away from your company.

That’s why brand transparency is so important. It includes everything from standing by your brand promise to being clear about your policies, product development, business goals, and core values. 

You should also know what matters to your target audience and what would break their trust in your brand. For instance, our research found that 46% of consumers would have a negative perception of brands that use AI to generate marketing content—signaling that this common marketing tactic may harm your brand.

Here are just a few important areas for brand transparency:

While consistency should always be a brand goal, so should evolution. Conduct regular brand health and customer experience audits to see where there might be opportunities to try new things, modernize your strategies, and respond to key trends. 

And pay attention to customers’ perception of your brand and their brand associations. If a brand attributes survey reveals that people think your brand personality is stuffy or outdated, you’ll know that it’s time to consider how to refresh and reframe your brand image.

Brand value is the monetary worth of a brand, or the amount of money a company could potentially receive if it were to sell its brand (including its name, logo, and brand equity).

Knowing what your brand is worth helps you track whether your company is gaining or losing value. With insights from brand tracking, you can finetune your marketing strategies or campaigns to raise your equity and customer loyalty—which will in turn raise your brand value.

A good brand value means that your brand is worth a high amount of money, but it also goes deeper than that. If your brand value is high, it likely means that you have positive brand equity and a strong identity—and that’s just good for business. 

If you were selling your own brand to another company, you’d be selling more than your products and services. You’d be selling the intangible assets that make your brand unique and desirable to your customers. 

Calculate your brand value using the methods described in this article—including market-based, cost-based, and brand metrics like the Net Promoter Score. You could also put together an analysis of what it would cost to develop a brand equivalent to the one you have now.

Apple is reportedly the most valuable brand in the world, followed by Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Walmart. 

The brand value chain model is a framework for understanding and analyzing what contributes to a brand’s overall value. It breaks down the process of building brand value into four stages:

This process is linear, meaning each stage influences the next, and there are “multipliers” that influence the stages individually and as a whole. For example, your marketing program investment will affect your customer mindset. But program quality (the multiplier) will determine the success of that investment stage and, in turn, whether there’s a positive customer mindset as a result.

The concept of the brand value chain was developed in 2003, so while it can be a helpful way to think about building brand value, it doesn’t take into account more modern marketing like digital marketing.

Your brand value is more than just a price tag. It factors in the value of tangible assets like your name, logo, colors, and packaging, as well as critical intangibles like your brand identity. By prioritizing strategies that will boost your brand value, you’ll naturally improve your brand equity, customer relationships, and brand awareness, too. And that adds up to significant business success.

Want to determine how much your brand is worth? See why marketers around the world rely on SurveyMonkey for brand building. Start with our Brand Performance Survey Template and Brand Awareness Survey Template to collect critical brand health insights.

Net Promoter, Net Promoter Score, and NPS are trademarks of Satmetrix Systems, Inc., Bain & Company, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.