How to Enhance Value? A Comparative Approach between Marketing and Finance

Abstract

What people do with brands has always been considered a source of value for them. Nonetheless, during the last decade, this phenomenon has been accelerated by the rising power of consumer communities, backed by the development of the internet and social media. It has been shown today that the success of a brand increasingly relies on the existence of a community of totally captive and loyal fans who co-create the value of that brand through their numerous practices. This paper seeks to respond to both these questions on brand value by drawing relationships between three worlds still unknown to each other: the world of the brand communities, the world of brand management and the world of brand valuation. One of the challenges is thus to avoid creating adverse effects by exercising too much shareholder pressure on the company-consumer relationship, while at the same time ensuring that the exchange value created is well-redistributed to the shareholders and not deviated to other ends of common knowledge or reputation, to the detriment of the wealth distributed to the owners of the company. On the other hand, it is also necessary to ensure that shareholder and financial demands do not jeopardise the means deployed for brand orchestration in order to acquire practices likely to carry exchange value.