What Is Brand Equity? Measuring a Brand as an Asset

Looking only at revenue or average order value can lead to a mistaken assessment of brand equity. How customers perceive the company, what they actually choose, and how much profit the business earns from a transaction need separate examination.

What is brand equity?

This article focuses on brand equity from the customer's perspective. Keller (1993) conceptualizes it as the difference that knowledge of a brand makes to consumer responses to its marketing.[1] The comparison concerns responses to the same offering under the brand name versus a fictitious name or no name.

The paper describes brand knowledge in terms of awareness and image. It is a conceptual model from the individual consumer's perspective, not a study establishing a percentage increase in revenue for Japanese B2B SMEs.

For practical purposes, the question is how knowing your company affects the customer's judgment. This differs from calculating a monetary valuation of the brand.

Separate perceptions, behavior, and financial results

The following is a practical way for business owners to interpret information. It is not a model in which improving three stages in sequence guarantees results.

Customer perceptions. What kind of company comes to mind, what do customers expect, and what concerns do they have? Record whose responses you collected and when. Begin by keeping the company's self-assessment separate from customer feedback.

Customer behavior. Did customers shortlist, buy from, stay with, or refer the company? Distinguish favorable responses from actual purchases. When investigating retention, consider contract conditions and the burden of switching as well as customers' assessments.

Financial results from transactions. Examine revenue, average order value, and gross profit. A higher order value may reflect different specifications or larger projects. Do not treat it alone as evidence that brand equity has increased.

Compare these areas to formulate the next question. If customers assess you favorably but do not buy, investigate budgets, implementation conditions, and alternatives. If orders grow without sufficient profit, examine pricing, costs, and scope. These are possible explanations to investigate, not conclusions established by the outcome alone.

Do not turn one metric into a brand score

Rates of direct selection or orders through referrals can help track changes in trading patterns. Keep denominators, populations, periods, and classification methods consistent. Leave unknown cases marked as unknown.

Do not simply add customer survey results to accounting data as though they measure the same thing. Nor should separate aggregates be presented as the path of a single transaction when the corresponding customers or projects cannot be identified. Even with matched data, changes occurring together do not establish causation. Record concurrent changes such as price revisions or product changes.

HUV's basic BRAND CHECK is free.[2] This article does not treat its score as a prediction of future average order values or direct-selection rates. We suggest using the result to identify questions to investigate against customer responses and transaction records.

What decision will the measurement support?

Start with one customer group and service, and decide what you need to establish. Does actual delivery match the value customers expect? Can you continue promising that value? These questions connect measurement with management and operational decisions.

For definitions and collection methods, see measuring B2B branding. If leadership needs to agree on target customers, value, and reasons to choose the company, see HUV's services.

Thinking of brand equity as an asset should not remove the need to examine the relationships between customer perceptions, purchasing behavior, and financial results. That examination provides a basis for using the information in the next decision.

Sources

[1] Keller, K. L. (1993). Conceptualizing, Measuring, and Managing Customer-Based Brand Equity. Journal of Marketing, 57(1), 1–22. See pp. 1–2 for the definition and components of brand knowledge. https://people.duke.edu/~moorman/Marketing-Strategy-Seminar-2015/Session%203/Keller.pdf

[2] HUV's official services page, distinguishing free BRAND CHECK from the separate individual assessment. https://huvdesignoffice.com/en/services

Accessed October 24, 2026. The practical separation of perceptions, behavior, and financial results is not presented as an effectiveness finding from the paper.

Author: Daisuke Irikura, Representative Director, HUV DESIGN OFFICE