The Brand Bubble: The Looming Crisis in Brand Value and How to Avoid It

By John Gerzema and Ed LeBar
Publisher: Wiley & Sons
Official Book Website

"Young & Rubicam's specialty is understanding brands and building brand value. This book teaches how to do what they do best."
- Anne Mulcahy, Chief Executive Officer Xerox

"This book thoroughly explains how the forces of social media and consumer power are reshaping the meaning and value of brands."
- Chris DeWolfe, Co-Founder and CEO MySpace


Your company's stock price depends on the value of your brand. So if consumers aren't valuing it as much as financial markets, the future of your company could be in for big trouble. You could be the victim of a "brand bubble".

Customer surveys show that the number of high-performance value-creating brands is diminishing across the board. Yet at the same time, businesses and financial markets keep raising brand valuations. The result? A brand bubble that could erase large portions of intangible value in your company and send another shockwave through the global economy.

Drawing on a detailed analysis of a decade's worth of brand and financial data from Young and Rubicam's BrandAsset® Valuator, the largest brand database in the world, authors John Gerzema and Ed Lebar lay out credible evidence that business thinks brands are worth more than the consumers who buy them. Given that one third of all shareholder value is brand value, this growing disconnect should be of urgent concern to CEOs, marketers, analysts and investors.

The Brand Bubble provides both analysis and solution.

The first half of the book reveals the surprising findings from extensive data. The authors' research not only uncovered the brand bubble, they discovered how companies can raise the value of their brand with the one factor that today's consumers respond to: energized differentiation, a brand's questing spirit for continuous evolution. Brands with this quality have proven to be irresistible to consumers and have higher valuations than other brands.

In the second half, the authors guide the reader through a five-stage process for reorganizing your company around your brand and raising its value in the eyes of both consumers and financial markets. Through interviews, data, and fascinating case studies of today's most vibrant brands, Gerzema and Lebar demonstrate that marketing is now a responsibility that lies everywhere within the organization - and key to ensuring sustainable, profitable brand performance.

For more information, please visit www.thebrandbubble.com.