Brands: An Integrated Marketing, Finance, and Societal Perspective

Brands: An Integrated Marketing, Finance, and Societal Perspective draws on research on the marketing-finance interface to suggest how marketing and finance can become better aligned. The overriding issue is how to use the power of brands to link marketing's role in creating value for consumers and finance's role in deploying assets to obtain the best financial returns and shareholder value. In addition, with the growing attention to corporate responsibility, the relevance of brands for how firms address stakeholders other than consumers is considered. After a short introduction, Section 2 describes the fundamental practical problem with the marketing-finance interface. Section 3 examines several issues that create conceptual confusion around the marketing-finance interface. Section 4 reviews evidence that despite difficulties with the marketing-finance interface, brands do matter for firm financial performance and for shareholder value. Section 5 distinguishes brand evaluation from brand valuation and discusses the use of the former in designing a better marketing-finance interface. Section 6 deals with the issue of brand purpose and how the development of brands that engage consumers around societally relevant goals and values can overcome the principal-agent model view that firms should ignore other stakeholders and only try to maximize shareholder value. Section 7 concludes with managerial implications.