Brand valuation as an immanent component of brand value building and managing

The process of brand value building and managing should form part of the strategic marketing of any enterprise whose primary objective is the market share growth. This is because the brand has the potential to be a source of a long-term sustainable competitive advantage of such an enterprise. But there is lack of desired result within the branding efforts without the efficient method of brand value quantifying. Nowadays, there are many methods of brand valuation, which can be grouped into internally homogeneous groups based on their access to financial indicators usage, possible objectives, intended universality of value, brand risk representing and so on. These methods have differences among themselves, particularly in relation to the scope and nature of the input data and reliability and validity of obtained results in relation to its further applicability in branding. This is the reason why the results of critical evaluation focused on different methods of brand valuation in the context of the Slovak branding specifics, is the aim of this paper. Most of published results form part of the special research realized to analyze possible sources of competitive advantages of Slovak enterprises. In this research, it was found that the current state of branding in the Slovak Republic is unsatisfactory and not competitive with foreign. As one of the reasons, the absence of a continuous brand value monitoring was detected. So, we offer a brief overview of applicable methods, which are convenient to specific Slovak conditions and which could be used to make brands competitive on the international base of globalized market. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.