Brand strategy
firms for value
creation: how
to tell who
can move
enterprise value

Most companies spend six figures on brand and cannot tell you what it did to the value of the business. Not because the work was bad. Because nobody asked the question that decides whether it was worth doing: what did this change about what the company is worth, and how would we know?

If you are choosing a brand strategy partner, the market hands you a long list and almost no way to tell the firms apart. Everyone promises strategy. Everyone shows beautiful work. The question that actually settles whether the fee pays for itself gets asked least: can this firm connect what it does to revenue, margin, and the price the next buyer pays?

The trouble is not that brand matters too little. It is that brand keeps being discussed in language that makes it sound trivial. Talk about it as look and feel and it reads as decoration. Price it as a capital decision and it reads as what it is.

What follows is a field map, not a league table. It is written for the boardroom, not the marketing review.

What a brand strategy firm actually does

A brand strategy firm decides what a business should stand for, to whom, and why that matters commercially. Not a logo, not a campaign. The layer above both: the positioning and the narrative that make a business easier to choose, harder to copy, able to charge more. The good ones tie that to the business model. The best tie it to the balance sheet.

Identity is the visible expression, the logo and palette and tone. Strategy is the commercial logic underneath it, the decision about what the identity should say and why. Strategy is the blueprint; identity is the building. Lead with the building and you have the order backwards.

Is this even a brand problem?

The most useful thing a firm like this can tell you is when not to hire it. So, one level above the criteria: is brand your constraint, or is something else wearing its clothes? Plenty of businesses reach for a brand project when the real problem sits in the product or the sales motion, where a sharper identity changes nothing. Others have a real brand problem they have quietly filed under "pricing". The signs are fairly reliable both ways.

If the left column is you, most of the firms in the map below will serve you well, and a value-creation firm is the wrong and more expensive tool. Say as much to anyone you brief, and watch who agrees. The firm willing to tell you that you do not need it yet is showing you the judgement you are paying for.

The field, mapped

The phrase "brand strategy firm" covers at least five different businesses doing five different jobs. Naming the categories is more useful than ranking the firms, because the right choice depends entirely on the problem you are solving. Here is the field, characterised fairly, with the one thing each type tends not to combine.

Naming firms is deliberate. It helps you build a shortlist, and it is honest about where each type is strong. None of this is criticism. A business that needs a category-defining visual identity should hire a design-led firm, and Wolff Olins or Pentagram will do it better than anyone. The point is narrower: most of these firms are not built to answer the enterprise-value question, and you should not expect them to.

What brand does to enterprise value

Brand is no longer a soft asset. It is most of what a modern business is worth. By the end of 2025 intangibles made up roughly 92% of the market value of the S&P 500, on Ocean Tomo's reckoning. In 1975 it was the reverse, with tangible assets about 83% of the total. Value has moved from what you can touch to what you can think.

The markets already price this. The IPA and Brand Finance survey of investment analysts found brand and marketing strength to be the factor they cite most often when they value the companies they cover. Brand is not outside the valuation. It is inside it, named in the plan or not.

The clearest proof is in the multiples. Take Refinitiv. A Blackstone-led consortium bought Thomson Reuters' financial and risk arm in 2018 at a $20bn valuation, then recast it from a legacy data terminal into open financial-markets infrastructure. Same data. Same engineers. Same customers. LSEG paid $27bn for it in 2021. Seven billion dollars sat in how the business was understood, and the pattern repeats across categories.

Brand reaches enterprise value through three routes a finance team will recognise. Pricing power, which lands straight in EBITDA margin. Lower acquisition cost, which lands there too. And the goodwill a strategic buyer pays a premium for at exit. A sustained 5% price premium on £50m of revenue is £2.5m of EBITDA a year; at a 10x exit multiple, £25m of enterprise value, built rather than inherited. The mechanism is not in dispute. Whether the firm you hire can move it, that is the open question.

Who this is for

The people who own the enterprise-value question: operating partners and PE partners, founders and CFOs, the occasional CMO who carries a P&L. Not logo refreshes, not early-stage positioning with no valuation at stake. In practice the work earns its fee on PE-backed and founder-led businesses somewhere between £20m and £300m of enterprise value, and on the investors who own them. The rest of this assumes real money is on the line.

Why most brand projects fail to create value

The uncomfortable part. Most brand work fails to create measurable value, and it fails for structural reasons rather than bad craft. The failures recur.

No baseline. The firm never establishes what the business is worth at the start, so it can never show what changed. No stake in the ground, no proof. Every claim of impact is then an assertion with a good-looking deck around it.

Then the accountability gap. The work gets measured in awareness and preference, which are real but which nobody in a deal room is paid on. Revenue, margin, cash, risk, multiple: that is the language that moves capital, and most brand work never gets translated into it.

No causal proof. With no baseline and no financial frame, the firm cannot separate its own contribution from everything else that moved in the same eighteen months. Unattributable. Which, in a portfolio, means deferrable.

And brand keeps getting severed from the things it actually drives. From pricing, where the premium a strong brand sustains is the most direct financial expression of brand strength and is almost never tracked as one. From demand, where the line back to acquisition cost and retention goes unmodelled. From the exit narrative, which a buyer pays up for and which has to be built from the first year of ownership, not assembled in the data room in the last.

Here is the strange part. Goodwill, the line on the balance sheet that is literally the price a buyer paid for everything the brand carries, is the line owners most reliably stop thinking about the day the deal closes. They pay for it on the way in. Then they manage it as though it were a logo.

Two people who have spent careers inside finance and behavioural science have named why. In Goodwill isn't a rounding error, the City analyst Ian Whittaker put it plainly: "Financial analysis isn't blind to brand. It's just not built to see it." Brand sits in SG&A as a cost against this year's EBITDA, while the return shows up three to five years out, in places the model does not reach. So the system rewards cutting it.

Rory Sutherland, in the same essay, found the motive: "There is an enormous dose of self-interest in pretending that quantification will provide you with all the answers, because that is what they sell." The advisers who write value-creation plans are built to measure and attribute fast. Brand is slow. It loses the argument before the meeting starts.

Brand strategy for private equity

Private equity feels this most sharply, because the clock is explicit.

For most of the last decade returns came from leverage and multiple expansion. StepStone analysis in McKinsey's 2026 Global Private Markets Report puts 59% of buyout returns between 2010 and 2022 down to those two things alone. Buy well, finance cheaply, wait for the re-rate, sell. The business barely had to change. That era is over. Rates stayed high, multiples stopped expanding, entry prices hit a record 11.8x EBITDA in 2025. Returns have to be made now, not found, which is why PE operating teams have roughly doubled since 2021. The industry has worked out that it must create real operational and revenue value. It has not yet named brand as one of the levers.

Timing is the trap. Funds underwrite three-to-five-year holds, yet realised holds have stretched past six. Brand compounds over a longer horizon than a fund wants to wait, so the temptation is to harvest it instead of build it. As Whittaker puts it, the goodwill at exit is "the accounting record of brand investment compounded or starved. You pay for it on the way in, and you pay for it again on the way out."

Here is the counterintuitive bit. The cheapest moment to build brand is the one the deal clock fights hardest: day one of the hold, when there is nothing yet to show for it and every incentive points at the legible operational wins instead. Build then and it compounds across the whole hold. Wait, and in the final year you are repricing a story the buyer can tell was written for the sale.

So brand in a deal is not a rebrand. It runs on the deal clock. Price brand as a financial asset at diligence, not a survey. Fund it in the value-creation plan as a line item with a projected return, the discipline set out in Brand as a value creation lever. Track pricing power as a KPI next to EBITDA margin. And build the exit narrative from entry, because, as The exit premium is built in year one, not year four argues, a story assembled at the end does not survive the buyer's scrutiny.

The criteria: how to tell who can move enterprise value

This is the spine. The firms that create value, rather than decorate it, meet a standard most of the field does not. Six criteria, to carry into the brief and the pitch.

The ten questions to ask before hiring any brand firm

The criteria become useful the moment you turn them into questions. Ask these of any firm on your shortlist, ours included. The answers separate the firms that move value from the firms that describe it, and you will know inside the first meeting.

When brand is a distraction, and when it is a lever

The same engagement is wasteful in one business and decisive in another. The difference is whether brand is the binding constraint on value. It is worth being blunt about both.

Valuation versus value creation

A common and expensive confusion, worth thirty seconds. Brand valuation tells you what a brand is worth today. Brand Finance, Kantar and Interbrand do this rigorously, to international standards, and the number earns its keep for licensing, litigation and M&A. But a valuation is a photograph. It measures the asset; it does not move it.

Brand value creation is the work of making the asset worth more, and proving it did. The two need different firms. A valuation specialist tells you, precisely, what you have. A value-creation firm tells you what it could be worth, what has to change to get there, and how you will know it worked. Need the number? Hire the measurer. Need the number to go up? Different brief, different firm.

When to call a value-creation firm

Six moments when this work pays for itself.

• Post-acquisition, day zeroThe most valuable moment, and the most wasted. Set the baseline and the exit narrative while you still have the whole hold period to compound them.
• Mid-hold stallGrowth has plateaued and the operational levers are spent. Perception and pricing power are the levers left.
• Paid-acquisition ceilingCustomer acquisition cost keeps rising and performance marketing has hit diminishing returns. Brand is the only durable way to lower it.
• Forced rebrandA carve-out, a name change or a separation is happening anyway. Do it as a value-creation exercise, not a cosmetic one.
• Pre-exitTwelve to twenty-four months out, with enough runway to build a narrative a buyer believes rather than one assembled in the data room.
• Weak comp setThe business is being priced against the wrong comparators, and repositioning the company changes the multiple it is measured by.

The wider pattern

Step back, and brand is one instance of a larger problem.

Institutions systematically misprice value that is hard to measure. Not because the people are not clever, but because the systems and incentives select for what is legible now over what compounds later. Brand is the clearest example. The pattern runs wider: the most valuable assets in a modern business are often the ones the measurement framework handles worst.

Rory Sutherland's reading of why goes underneath the spreadsheet. Capital allocation inside a leveraged business, he argues, "is closer to a social system for mitigating institutional embarrassment, conducted in the carefully calibrated language of returns." A decision that fails conventionally is survivable. A decision that fails unconventionally is career-ending. Cost-cutting is the first kind of risk; brand investment is the second. So the value gets cut, and the bill arrives at exit.

Ian Whittaker reaches the same place from the analyst's desk: "What is valuable but unmeasured is the largest sustained mispricing in capital allocation today. Closing it is the work of the next decade."

That is the real category. Not brand strategy as a craft, but value creation as a discipline, built on a simple thesis: assets are perceived before they are priced. The firms that understand this are not in the business of making companies look better. They are in the business of closing the gap between what a company is worth and what it could be worth.

Which firms connect brand strategy and enterprise value

Back to the question the search started with. The honest answer is that the field is built against it. The firms strong on perception are not built for the financial and exit questions; the firms strong on finance do not treat brand as the central asset. Valuation specialists measure but do not move. Integrated consultancies join strategy to creative, then frame the value as growth rather than enterprise value. None of this is anyone's failing. It is what happens when a field grows up filing brand under marketing instead of capital.

The firms that close the gap are the emerging value-creation category. Small in number. Recognisable less by what they say than by what they ask for first: a valuation baseline. Aha Partners works this way, and it is not the only one. The category is young enough that the right move is not to pick a name off a list. It is to apply the test.

So apply it. Hold every candidate, this one included, to the six criteria. The firm that will set a baseline, prove a delta, and talk in the language of the next buyer is the firm that can move the number. One buyer's version of the standard sits underneath all of it, in Frank Cotroneo's line from his years as CFO of Mastercard International: "Investors do not buy revenue. They buy the certainty that revenue will hold." The work is building that certainty before the buyer thinks to ask for it.

Most firms cannot. That is the whole point.