Brand Equity Consulting

Brand equity consulting establishes what your customers actually believe about your brand, which of those beliefs separate you from the alternatives they were really considering, and which of them show up in what people will pay and how long they stay. Vivaldi has treated brand as an economic asset since 1999, and our position is simple: a belief is only equity where it changes a commercial decision.

• Since 1999brand strategy and brand equity work
• 200+published case studies
• 10 officeson four continents
• 5xWirtschaftsWoche Best of Consulting, Strategy and Innovation
• Brand Leadershipco-authored by our founder

When companies bring us in

Brand equity work is usually bought by a CMO or a chief strategy officer, and increasingly commissioned jointly with finance. There is almost always a specific decision waiting on it rather than a wish to know more about the brand.

• The brand budget is being questioned. A CFO or a new CEO is asking what the brand returns, and the current answer is a tracker reporting awareness and sentiment with no line to revenue.
• The premium is eroding. Discounting has become routine, a challenger or a private label is closing the gap, and nobody can say which beliefs the premium was resting on in the first place.
• A refresh or a rebrand is on the table. The leadership team is split on whether to change the brand or the business behind it, and there is no evidence base that would settle the argument either way.
• An acquisition or a divestment is coming. Two brands are about to sit under one owner, or one is about to leave, and no one has established what customers would actually miss if a name disappeared.
• The brand means different things in different markets. Every region reports healthy numbers on its own measures, and the company has no comparable view of what it owns across them.

Why awareness tracking does not tell you what your brand is worth

Most brand equity reporting is a ranking of things customers agree with. It is comfortable to read and almost impossible to act on, because agreement is cheap and the scores rarely move. Four problems account for most of it.

• Awareness is a precondition, not an asset. Being known is the price of entry in a considered category. It explains who gets on the list, not who wins once everyone on the list is known.
• Parity is counted as equity. If every brand in the category scores well on trust, quality and reliability, those associations are the cost of competing. Averaging them into an equity index inflates the number and hides the part that is actually yours.
• Nobody asks the people who said no. Samples drawn from customers measure the beliefs of people who already chose you. The informative answers sit with the buyers who considered you and went elsewhere, and with the ones who left.
• The measure cannot return a bad answer. A score with no link to price, win rate or retention has no way of being wrong, so it survives every year regardless of what the brand is doing in the market.

We write about the distinction at more length in our guides to what brand equity is and how it is built, brand equity versus brand value, and measuring brand equity quantitatively. One boundary is worth setting here: running the tracker is a different service. Our brand performance team owns ongoing measurement systems, dashboards and the metrics that get reported each quarter. This page is about deciding what is worth measuring in the first place and what the answer should change.

What our brand equity consulting includes

Five bodies of work. Most companies arrive asking for the first and need the third.

1. Establishing the equity you actually have

Before anything is modeled, we establish what is believed about the brand and by whom, including the people who are not buying it.

• What current customers, lapsed customers and rejectors believe the brand is for, and where those three answers diverge.
• Which associations are genuinely attached to your brand and which are attached to the category, tested against the alternatives a buyer actually weighed.
• Where stated belief and observed behavior disagree, which is usually the most useful finding in the study.

2. Separating what differentiates from what the category already owns

The purpose of this step is subtraction. An equity model that keeps everything is a description of the market, not of your asset.

• A parity line drawn across the competitive set, so the associations everyone owns stop being counted as strengths.
• The beliefs that remain yours alone, stated specifically enough that a product or pricing team could act on one.
• The beliefs you are paying to maintain that no buyer uses to choose, which is where most of the recoverable budget sits.

3. Connecting equity to price, preference and retention

This is the part that makes the rest defensible in front of finance. Equity that cannot be traced to behavior is an opinion with a sample size.

• Choice work that separates what people say from what they will pay for, so a preference has a price attached rather than a rating.
• The drivers modeled against price realization, win rate and retention, so each one carries an estimated commercial weight rather than a rank.
• A view of where the brand is carrying the business and where the product, the distribution or the price is doing the work instead.

4. Deciding what to fund and what to stop

An equity study that ends in a report has not finished. The output we are contracted on is a list of decisions with owners.

• The small number of beliefs worth building, with the product, experience and communications work each one requires named separately.
• What stops, including the attributes being defended out of habit and the proof points no buyer has ever used.
• The handover to measurement, so the drivers that mattered become the things tracked rather than the things that were easy to ask.

5. Brand equity in transactions and portfolio decisions

Equity questions get sharpest when a name is about to change hands or disappear. We work on the customer side of that decision.

• What customers would miss if a brand were absorbed, retired or endorsed, and which audiences would notice first.
• Migration risk when equity is moved to a parent or a new name, including what cannot be transferred and has to be rebuilt.
• What a divested brand takes with it, separated from what stays with the business that is being sold.

We are not a valuation firm. We do not produce the financial valuation of a trademark that an auditor or a transaction requires, and when that is what you need we will say so and stay out of the way. Our contribution is the customer evidence the valuation rests on.

How a brand equity engagement works

1. Frame. The decision the study has to settle, named before any fieldwork: a pricing move, an investment case, a rebrand, a portfolio choice. The sample, the competitive set and the success measure are all chosen from that decision backwards.
2. Measure. Qualitative work to find the language customers actually use, then quantitative work with customers, lapsed customers and rejectors in the sample, using choice tasks rather than agreement scales alone.
3. Connect. The drivers modeled against price realization, win rate and retention, with the parity set removed, so each surviving belief carries a commercial weight your finance team can interrogate.
4. Decide. The investment list, the stop list, the owners and the review trigger, plus the handover to whoever will track the drivers from here.

Why companies choose Vivaldi for brand equity work

Our 2026 study of twenty-four years of stock market data, by Joachimsthaler, Powney and Rolka, found that strong global brands beat the S&P 500 by 3.7 percentage points a year from 2001 to 2024, with a dollar invested becoming $15.85 against $7.03 in the index. That is the argument for treating brand as an asset rather than a cost line. It is a finding about brands that were strong, not about brands that were measured, and no study we run will produce that gap on its own. Three things separate how we work.

• We subtract before we add. The parity line is drawn first, so the equity we report is the part that is actually yours. Most indexes do the opposite and inflate accordingly.
• The sample includes the people who said no. Rejectors and lapsed customers are in the study by default. A brand that only asks its own buyers will always hear that it is trusted.
• The commercial decisions sit in the same group. Pricing strategy, positioning and architecture are held by the same partners, so an equity problem that turns out to be a pricing problem gets reclassified early rather than delivered as the wrong answer.

How to evaluate a brand equity consultant

Worth asking of anyone on your shortlist, including us.

• Ask what the study will tell you to stop doing. A firm that cannot describe the stop list in the pitch is selling a report, not a decision.
• Ask who is in the sample. If the answer is customers, you are buying a satisfaction study with a different cover.
• Ask how a stated preference becomes a paid one. There should be a method here, not an assertion. Agreement scales alone will not get you there.
• Ask what the number does when the brand gets worse. A measure that cannot return an uncomfortable answer is reporting, not measurement.
• Ask who owns it after the deck. Name the person, the review date and the trigger that would make the company revisit the investment.

Brand equity consultancy, brand tracking vendor or brand valuation firm?

Related work

Brand equity sits between the brand decisions and the commercial ones, and most briefs that arrive here belong partly somewhere else. Where your question probably sits:

• Brand performance owns ongoing measurement: the tracker, the dashboard and the metrics reported each quarter.
• Corporate brand positioning owns what the brand should stand for once you know what it currently owns.
• Brand architecture owns how many brands you run and how they endorse each other, which is where migration decisions are made.
• Brand and product portfolio strategy owns which brands and products earn their place and which should be retired.
• Pricing strategy owns converting a premium you have evidence for into prices the market will accept.
• Research and insights owns the research design when the question is broader than brand.
• Brand purpose owns what the company is for, which is a question of intent rather than of what customers currently believe.
• Marketing transformation owns rebuilding the marketing operation once the investment list has changed.

This work sits inside our competitive strategy group and is run jointly with the brand strategy team, part of the Brand, Innovation & Experience practice at Vivaldi, where the argument is that brand is the face of the business strategy rather than a communications budget.

Brand equity consulting in the US and worldwide

Our brand equity work runs out of ten offices on four continents, with the US practice led from New York. Equity does not travel evenly: the association that carries the premium in Germany is frequently not the one carrying it in the US, and a global index that averages the two will hide both. We run multi-market studies with a common competitive frame and a common choice task so the markets can be compared, then report the drivers separately so regional teams are given something they can act on rather than a global average nobody recognizes. Since 1999 we have worked on brand as an economic asset across consumer goods, financial services, healthcare, industrials and technology.