Open Access

Robin Wankerl

• In recent years, research on brand value has been created to illustrate the im-portance of brands for companies’ success, primarily within specific markets but also in a general context. This thesisIn recent years, research on brand value has been created to illustrate the im-portance of brands for companies’ success, primarily within specific markets but also in a general context. This thesis extends the previous theoretical approaches by developing a research model which focuses on a specific market (United States) and on consumer-based industries only to investigate the brand value and perfor-mance nexus on a comparative basis. The dataset consists of 84 brands in total including the following composition of industries: Consumer-goods (19), consumer-services (35), telecommunications (8), and technology (22). All these firms are an-alyzed for a period of eight years from 2007 to 2014. The financial performance measurements are defined as sales revenue, gross profit, pretax income, net in-come, earnings per share, and cash dividends in order to achieve a generally relia-ble interpretation on the brand value and performance nexus. Further, this thesis investigates potential performance benefits due to higher brand strength in the way to set up an annual top 10 brand portfolio and comparing it to the overall stock mar-ket. Finally, the study provides robust evidence that brand value improves a firm’s performance in general, even though there are major differences amongst indus-tries. The consumer-services industry demonstrates the most significant correlation between both parameters while the consumer-goods industry shows the least sig-nificance in the overall analysis. With regards to potential outperformances in the stock market, the research outlines a 25% outperformance of the portfolio in the period of the analysis. However, abnormal returns – in only 50% of the years ana-lyzed – are statistically insignificant, even though stronger brands show a more ro-bust performance during times of recession.…