How to measure the intangible

Last week I was on a work trip in Miami and, on an afternoon off, found myself sitting on South Beach watching a series of gigantic cargo ships ease slowly out of Miami Port and head towards destinations across the world.

Stacked to the gills with containers, all perfectly aligned, I found myself wondering how something on that scale manages to fit together so neatly.

The answer, of course, is standardisation.

For decades, the global shipping industry has operated around agreed container dimensions established by the International Standards Organization (ISO). Because every container follows the same standards, it can move seamlessly from ship, to train, to truck, almost anywhere in the world. It all fits. It all works.

And interestingly, ISO did something very similar for brands.

In 2010, it introduced ISO 10668 — the international standard for brand valuation — establishing a framework for measuring the financial value of a brand.

Which raises an interesting question: how do you place a financial value on something intangible?

A factory has value. Machinery has value. Inventory has value. You can see them, count them, and measure them. But what about a name, a reputation, or trust?

ISO defines a brand as an intangible asset — something without physical substance that is still capable of generating economic benefit. In practice, that means the combination of characteristics, perceptions, and experiences that help a business remain relevant to its audience and differentiated from its competitors.

And those characteristics can be worth enormous sums of money.

According to organisations such as Interbrand and Kantar BrandZ, brands such as Apple, Microsoft and Amazon are valued in the hundreds of billions. A significant proportion of that value does not sit in buildings or machinery, but in what people believe, trust, and choose.

Whilst ISO defines recognised ways of measuring brand value (which you can read about in my blog This Way Up: How to measure brand value), the interesting thing is not really the mathematics itself, but what the existence of the standard represents: brand value is real, measurable, and commercially significant.

Of course, most businesses are not sitting on brands worth hundreds of billions of dollars. But every business has a brand, whether it chooses to manage it deliberately or not.

And in many sectors, the difference between two organisations offering similar products or services is not operational capability alone, but the strength, clarity, and trust attached to the brand around it.

That matters even more today because businesses are no longer competing only for human attention. Increasingly, they are competing for machine interpretation too. AI-driven platforms, recommendation engines, and search algorithms all favour brands that are clear, consistent, and easy to understand.

In other words, AI is not replacing brand strategy; it is demanding more of it.

Clear brands are easier to recognise, easier to remember, easier to recommend, and easier to trust. And trust has value.

Which perhaps brings us back to those container ships easing out across the Atlantic.

What makes the system work is not the containers themselves, but the existence of a framework behind them.

ISO 10668 represents something similar for brands: a recognition that brand value is real, measurable, and commercially significant.

And in a world increasingly shaped by clarity, trust, and recognition, that matters more than ever.

But before a business can properly leverage its brand, communicate it consistently, or realise its full value, it first needs to be able to clearly define it.

And that is the role of brand strategy.

If you’d like to explore how The Brand Arrow can help define and capture the value of your brand, email me at bruce@thebrandarrow.com.

I’m now celebrating my 17th year running my Brand Strategy consultancy, as well as regularly speaking at conferences and lecturing at business schools, I teach brand management on the Chartered Institute of Marketing’s diploma course and am an accredited speaker with the Vistage CEO network. My expertise has helped hundreds of businesses stand out, grow, and thrive.