Brands, Valuing of Brands, and weird Malaysians.

Let's talk about Brands. There's all this talk nowadays about Malaysia's 30 most valuable brands award. Which I find I totally disagree with, since the judging was based on outlandish and abstract concepts. The problem seems to be that a lot of Managers and CEOs in Malaysia are morons, and do not understand how brands are supposed to work.

Which is ridiculous of them, since you can just look at "Kopitiam" and "Kluand" and "penang" and "ipoh" and "station" being placed in numerous eatery names. You see, even these small time (small compared to KLSE top 10 coys) fellas recognize the power of brand name recognition!

The only proper way to value a brand, in my opinion:
Try to estimate how much damage would be caused if that brand name was taken away, eg some patent lawsuit or similiar barring use of the brand name for 3 years.

Would AirAsia suffer much loss in revenue if they had to call themselves FernandezAirways? ... I think it would cause maybe 1month of lower revenue, but things would recover immediately.

Would Digi suffer much loss in revenue if they had to rename themselves to SmartPhones? ... IMHO, they would suffer VERY badly.

Would Coca-Cola suffer badly if they were forced to rename themselves Cola-Coca? ... It is common knowledge that losing that brand name would be a DISASTER.

Would Proton lose much sales if they were forced to rename themselves as Malaysian Motors? ... Actually, I think their revenue might GROW... lol.

As for Petronas, they could name themselves Barisan Oil Bank and I am pretty sure that their revenue, sales, and profit would remain pretty much unchanged. The big players out there don't really care much about your brand name, your advertising policy, your corporate vision, logo, etc etc. They just look at whether it's profitable to do business with you. Anyhow most of their revenue is just arranged directly by our government.

Compare that to say, Polo Ralph Lauren or Louis Vitton. If you carefully remove off the label from their product and slap on a generic brand name, the product becomes PRACTICALLY WORTHLESS.

To me, that is the ultimate test of whether a brand has value. Try to estimate the results of "with the brand" vs "without the brand"... ceterus parabus style.

A lot of companies have very very valuable brand names. If you replace their label with a generic name, they would lose hundreds of millions in sales. In this case, I would just directly say: this brand name is currently worth $100 million a year.

No ranking, no subjectiveness. After all, even the "contest" calls itself "most VALUABLE brands". And for a company, value is measured in MONEY / dollar/ ringgit terms... not based on whatever weird aesthetic or semi-mystical intrinsic things.
Heck... buying a brand creates an entry in the account books called "goodwill". (IIRC. My accounting can be shaky at times)

I'm not 100% certain, but I think that in developed nations, it is pretty much possible to find some high level financial whizzes who will be able to calculate for you how much each Brand in a company should be valued at, in dollar terms.

They should have someone do that in Malaysia too.