Diligence Matters Best Practices Briefs

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Brand Equity

De-risking and Leveraging Brand Equity Ownership in Commercial Due Diligence

By Jeff Merkle

In Commercial Due Diligence, it’s often the assumption that customer relationships are an “asset” of the business, but that’s not always the case. The reality is that for many businesses, the quality and stability of customer relationships are owned by account representatives (and possibly only a few reps) – who walk out the door with those assets every night, and who (for the right…

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Brand Equity: Institutionalized or Individualized?

By Jeff Merkle VIDEO

Evaluating the degree to which Brand Equity lies with a target company versus with individual sales and service reps of the company should be a key exercise in Commercial Due Diligence - for both the benefit of valuation and for value gen opportunity assessment. Determining the clues that enable methods for institutionalizing the relationships drives strength of recurring/repeat revenue,…

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Understanding the Market Share Equation in Diligence and in Value Gen. Exercises

By Jeff Merkle

I’ve been reflecting on Mark's recent article about how to better capitalize on brand equity – and particularly about those situations where you can exploit untapped brand equity. Mark promotes a winning investment formula of investing in cases where “RBE > RMS,” i.e., a company whose Relative Brand Equity is greater than its Relative Market Share. These situations are sadly not…

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The Greater Potential of Brand Equity Analysis to Drive Far More Significant Acquisition Returns and Deal Value

By Mark Stein

In every commercial due diligence assignment, clients reasonably expect a proper brand equity analysis. And yes, good diligence requires the requisite measures (i.e., relative brand familiarity, performance on the most important drivers-of-choice, likelihood to recommend/promote, etc.). Investment teams and the IC will always want to review these findings and take stock of the implications. But…