How exactly could we rank or value how “rich” a company brand is?
"Matt explains the study numbers in his answer, but those are the valuation of the brand, not the value of the company or how ""rich"" the company is.   Presuming that you're asking the value of the company, the usual way for a publicly traded company to be valued is by the market capitalization (1).  Market capitalization is a fairly simple measure, basically the total value of all the shares of stock in that company. You can find the market cap for any publicly traded company on any of the usual finance sites like Google Finance or Yahoo Finance. If by rich you mean the total value of assets (assets being all property, including cash, real property, equipment, and licenses) a company owns, that information is included in a publicly traded company's quarterly SEC filing and investor releases, but isn't usually listed on the popular finance sites. An example can be seen at Duke Energy's Investor Relation Site (the same information can be found for all companies on EDGAR, the SEC's search tool).  If you open the most recent 8-K (quarterly filing), and go to page 8, you can see that they have $33B+ in assets, and a high level breakdown of those. Note that the numbers are given in millions of dollars For a privately held company this information may or may not be available and you'd have to track it down if it is available. I picked Duke Energy because it's the first thing that popped into my mind.  I have no affiliation with Duke, and I don't directly own any of their stock." Those rankings in particular that you cite are compiled by Millward Brown and the methodology is explained like this:
There are books on the subject of valuing stocks. P/E ratio has nothing directly to do with the value of a company. It may be an indication that the stock is undervalued or overvalued, but does not indicate the value itself. The direct value of company is what it would fetch if it was liquidated. For example, if you bought a dry cleaner and sold all of the equipment and receivables, how much would you get? To value a living company, you can treat it like a bond. For example, assume the company generates $1 million in profit every year and has a liquidation value of $2 million. Given the risk profile of the business, let's say we would like to make 8% on average per year, then the value of the business is approximately $1/0.08 + $2 = $14.5 million to us. To someone who expects to make more or less the value might be different. If the company has growth potential, you can adjust this figure by estimating the estimated income at different percentage chances of growth and decline, a growth curve so to speak. The value is then the net area under this curve.  Of course, if you do this for NYSE and most NASDAQ stocks you will find that they have a capitalization way over these amounts. That is because they are being used as a store of wealth. People are buying the stocks just as a way to store money, not necessarily make a profit. It's kind of like buying land. Even though the land may never give you a penny of profit, you know you can always sell it and get your money back. Because of this, it is difficult to value high-profile equities. You are dealing with human psychology, not pennies and dollars. Imagine a poorly run store in the middle of downtown Manhattan. It has been in the family for a 100 years but the current generation is incompetent regarding running a business. The store is worthless because it is losing money, but the land it is sitting on is worth millions.  So yes an asset of the company can be worth more than the entire company.  What one would pay for the rights to the land, vs the entire company are not equal. Thanks for your comment! I don't understand what you mean by 'thinking their funny... in the graph...?' I also didn't set out to influence you, it is statistics from sproutsocial with I elaborated on.   I understand your cynicism of bad products, but how will people find out about your good product? It's about marketing, not sales.   I 100% agree with your grandfatherThe whole point of the article is to encourage businesses and brands to storytell instead of sell.   Thanks again for your time First read mhoran's answer, Then this -  If the company sold nothing but refrigerators, and had 40% market share, that's $4M/yr in sales. If they have a 30% profit margin, $1.2M in profit each year. A P/E of 10 would give a stock value totaling $12M, more than the market size. The numbers are related, of course, but one isn't the maximum of the other. There is plenty of research that shows that companies that have a portfolio of brands within the same category have superior financial returns.  The reason is that even for dish soap there are different types of people who want different products.  One of the more successful brands for P&amp;G over the past decade has been Gain detergent.  It is a mega-brand that competes with tide for people who love scent.  The brand has been so successful that there are now dish soaps and other products with the Gain name.  There are typically performance differences between the brands.  For example trade off performance against a certain type of stain for more scent. "Gold has no ""intrinsic"" value. None whatsoever.  This is because ""value"" is a subjective term. ""Intrinsic value"" makes just as much sense as a ""cat dog"" animal. ""Dog"" and ""cat"" are referring to two mutually exclusive animals, therefore a ""cat dog"" is a nonsensical term. Intrinsic Value:  ""The actual value of a company or an asset based on an underlying perception of its true value ...""  Intrinsic value is perceived, which means it is worth whatever you, or a group of people, think it is. Intrinsic value has nothing, I repeat, absolutely nothing, to do with anything that exists in reality.  The most obvious example of this is the purchase of a copy-right. You are assigning an intrinsic value to a copy-right by purchasing it. However, when you purchase a copy-right you are not buying ink on a page, you are purchasing an idea. Someone's imaginings that, for all intensive purposes, doesn't even exist in reality! By definition, things that do not exist do not have ""intrinsic"" properties - because things that don't exist, don't have any natural properties at all. ""Intrinsic"" according to Websters Dictionary:  ""Belonging to the essential nature or constitution of a thing ... (the intrinsic brightness of a star).""  An intrinsic property of an object is something we know that exists because it is a natural property of that object. Suns emit light, we know this because we can measure the light coming from it. It is not subjective. ""Intrinsic Value"" is the OPPOSITE of ""Intrinsic""" In addition to the answer by Craig Banach: Sometimes brands are owned by publicly traded companies which have a very diverse product portfolio. In case of Microsoft their stock price and dividend will not be controlled solely by that one product they make but also by their many other products (plus a billion other factors which can influence a stock price). So when you want to bet specifically on the success of Windows Phone then betting on the Microsoft Corporation as a whole might not achieve that goal. However, you can also try to find companies whose success depends indirectly on the success of the product. That can be suppliers (someone who makes a specific part which is only used for Windows phones), companies which make Windows Phone specific accessories or software developers who make applications which specifically target the Windows Phone ecosystem. When the product portfolio of these companies is far narrower than that of Microsoft they might be more dependent on the success of Windows Phone than Microsoft themselves. But as always, keep in mind that the success of their products is not the only factor which decides the stock value of a company. The stock market is far more complex than that. There seems to be a disconnect between brands and channels in which brands advertise. While I see and agree the point of the article, it treats all media channels as equal, where there are clear differences between them and as an extension the level of confidence given to a brand as a result.   The author does focuses on the millennials as a target group that is less receptive to advertising, but neglects to take into account the sheer volume of advertising that is around us - compared to ten or even twenty years ago - the increase has been exponential. Today it’s almost impossible to even go to even a family without having it sponsored by your local dentist, real estate agent and pizza chain.  The fact that millennial are performing more due diligence is not just a reflection on the group as a whole, but speaks volumes of the sheer quantity of (many low quality) options of media and advertising we come across on a daily basis. "A company's valuation includes its assets, in addition to projected earnings. Aside from the obvious issue that ""projected earnings"" can be wildly inaccurate or speculative (as in the case of startups and fast-moving industries like technology), a company's assets are not necessarily tied to the market the company is in. For the sake of illustration, say the government were to ban fast food tomorrow, and the market for that were to go all the way to zero.  McDonald's would still have almost 30 billion dollars worth of real estate holdings that would surely make the company worth something, even though it would have to stop selling its products. Similarly, Apple is sitting on approximately $200 billion dollars in cash and securities in overseas subsidiaries.  Even if they never make another cent selling iPhones and such, the company is still worth a lot because of those holdings. ""Corporate raiders"" back in the 70's and 80's made massive personal fortunes exploiting this disconnect in undervalued companies that had more assets than their market cap, by getting enough ownership to liquidate the company's assets.  Oliver Stone even made a movie about the phenomenon. So yes, it's certainly possible for a company to be worth more than the size of the market for its products." You are not seeing what I aim to explore.   Firstly, I am looking into whether or not CEO-charisma has any influence on consumers in their decision making process.  Secondly I want to see if their decision making process will differ between industries of certainty and industries of uncertainty.  That is why I chose a stable industry (bottled water) and an uncertain industry (computers).  In this survey I am using the Conger-Kanungo scale, which only has been used on internal analysis of the organisation so far. I want to see if the scale can be adapted to the external environment with the same results.  Edit: I just saw your second point. It does not matter who the CEO of Coke or Pepsi is. I took a hypothetical approach to reduce any bias in the survey. The idea here is to get an idea of how to value each business and thus normalize how highly prized is each dollar that a company makes.  While some companies may make millions and others make billions, how does one put these in proper context?  One way is to consider a dollar in earnings for the company.  How does a dollar in earnings for Google compare to a dollar for Coca-cola for example?  Some companies may be valued much higher than others and this is a way to see that as share price alone can be rather misleading since some companies can have millions of shares outstanding and split the shares to keep the share price in a certain range. Thus the idea isn't that an investor is paying for a dollar of earnings but rather how is that perceived as some companies may not have earnings and yet still be traded as start-ups and other companies may be running at a loss and thus the P/E isn't even meaningful in this case. Assuming everything but the P/E is the same, the lower P/E would represent a greater value in a sense, yes.  However, earnings growth rate can account for higher P/Es for some companies as if a company is expected to grow at 40% for a few years it may have a higher P/E than a company growing earnings at 5% for example. You seem to think that rich people have money just lying around. They don't, inflation takes care of that.  All money is in circulation, it's invested in companies. Who buy products from other companies with that money, and they buy products from other companies... etc. All of them employ people. All of them produce something worthwhile. "What does your comment have to do with my comment? You say ""Apple only designs stuff"" as if that has some bearing on their net worth. Right now Apple's stock is worth about as much as *Google and Microsoft combined*, and they're sitting on about 60B in *cash*. They are *extremely* wealthy. They could do absolutely nothing for a very very long time and still stay in business." And the kind folk at Yahoo Finance came to the same conclusion.  Keep in mind, book value for a company is like looking at my book value, all assets and liabilities, which is certainly important, but it ignores my earnings.  BAC (Bank of America) has a book value of $20, but trades at $8. Some High Tech companies have negative book values, but are turning an ongoing profit, and trade for real money. I definitely see the value from a business standpoint just not as a consumer.  I don't really feel like the prices are better than anywhere else.  They do have really great employees and I'm sure there's a group of people who go there for that, and I'm are that ties in to them paying a reasonable wage.  It will be really interesting to see where they are in 10 years