Your Brand Is Increasingly Defined By Your Sustainability

A Note From Intangible Businesse

At Intangible Business, we spend our time answering one question: what makes a brand valuable, and what puts that value at risk? Increasingly, sustainability is becoming a key input.

This month’s guest thought piece comes from Francesca Lee, Sustainability Strategist and Trainer at Social Value Architect, who argues that sustainability has moved from a communications exercise sitting beside the business to a driver of brand value itself, visible in how a company sources, designs, manufactures and stands behind what it sells.

The brand strength and brand risk factors we assess in a valuation increasingly include exactly what Francesca describes: whether a company’s sustainability claims are backed by what actually
happens in its supply chain.

Her examples — from Patagonia and IKEA’s supplier standards to the value destroyed by Volkswagen and the reputational exposure created for Dyson by a supplier’s conduct — are, in effect, case studies in brand value creation and brand value destruction. We’re grateful to Francesca for letting us share her work, published here under her own name.