Brand as a Valuation Lever: Why Scaleups That Invest in Brand Outperform at Exit
- Laura Derbyshire
- 3 days ago
- 4 min read
For years, brand has been treated as a “soft” asset. Hard to measure and sometimes even harder to justify.
In my experience, it is often the first line cut when budgets tighten.
Yet when investors assess value - particularly at Series B+, private equity entry, or exit - brand quietly exerts influence everywhere: pricing power, customer loyalty, growth resilience, and ultimately, multiple.
The highest-performing scaleups don’t treat brand as a marketing output, they treat it as a valuation lever.
What the data says about brand and valuation
McKinsey & Company and other strategic consultancies have consistently shown that companies with strong brands outperform their peers across growth, profitability, and shareholder return.
Key findings referenced across McKinsey, BCG and long-term market studies include:
Strong brands command price premiums of 10–20%
Brand-led businesses recover faster from downturns
Consistent brand investment correlates with a higher EBITDA multiple
Intangible assets now represent the majority of enterprise value in developed markets
In other words, brand doesn’t sit alongside value creation - it compounds it.
For scaleups, this matters because valuation is rarely just about current revenue. It’s about confidence in future cash flows. And brand is one of the strongest signals of that confidence.
Why brand becomes critical at scaleup stage
Early-stage companies grow through novelty, founder energy, and rapid experimentation, but at scale, those forces weaken.
What's required is:
Trust in decision-making moments
Recognition across wider buying audiences
Confidence from investors and boards
Reduced dependency on performance spend
And this is where many scaleups stall.
Performance marketing continues to drive short-term results, but CAC rises, differentiation erodes, and growth becomes fragile.
Without a strong brand, every quarter becomes a scramble to replace demand.
Brand as a growth and valuation multiplier
In the UK market, several scaleups demonstrate how brand shapes valuation narratives.
Fintech Monzo built trust, clarity, and emotional connection long before profitability. That brand equity translated into sustained customer growth, resilience through regulatory pressure, and investor belief in long-term value.
Consumer brands such as Gymshark moved beyond performance-led acquisition into cultural relevance. The brand unlocked global expansion, pricing power, and strategic optionality far beyond pure ecommerce metrics.
In both cases, the brand became shorthand for future relevance, customer loyalty and scalable demand. And those signals matter deeply in valuation discussions.
Where brand underwrites scale
In the US, this pattern is even more pronounced.
Companies like Airbnb invested heavily in brand during periods when performance metrics alone looked risky. That investment paid off by strengthening trust, accelerating recovery post-COVID, and reinforcing long-term valuation.
Similarly, enterprise brands like Notion and Salesforce built category leadership through consistency, clarity, and narrative - not just product features. Brand enabled them to command premium multiples long before margins fully matured.
The common thread is that investors understood what these companies stood for, not just what they sold.
Brand, risk reduction, and investor confidence
From a board or investor perspective, brand reduces risk in three critical ways:
1 > Revenue quality.
Strong brands generate repeat demand and pricing power, making revenue more predictable.
2 > Growth resilience.
Brand-led businesses are less exposed to algorithm changes, channel inflation, and competitive noise.
3 > Strategic optionality.
Brand strength supports expansion into new markets, products, and partnerships - all of which feed valuation upside.
Brand doesn’t eliminate risk, but it makes growth more legible.
Where scaleups go wrong with brand investment
The most common mistake is treating brand as a rebrand exercise, as just a campaign, or simply a visual refresh.
Without strategic clarity, brand spend becomes decoration.
This is why brand investment must be tightly linked to:
Growth strategy
Market positioning
Commercial priorities
Investor narrative
Otherwise, it fails the valuation test.
How boards should think about brand as a valuation lever
At OSER, we encourage leadership teams and boards to ask different questions:
Does our brand make future growth feel inevitable or fragile?
Can we clearly articulate why customers choose us - at scale?
Does our brand reduce reliance on paid acquisition over time?
Would an investor understand our differentiation in one slide?
Brand as strategy, not spend
For scaleups, brand is no longer a “nice to have.” It’s a strategic asset that underwrites valuation, growth resilience, and investor belief.
The question is no longer whether to invest in brand, but whether you’re investing in it with enough clarity to make it count.
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Questions CEOs and Founders Ask About Brand and Valuation
How does brand affect company valuation?
Brand influences valuation by improving pricing power, customer loyalty, growth predictability, and investor confidence. Strong brands reduce perceived risk and support higher valuation multiples.
Is brand investment relevant for scaleups or only large companies?
Brand becomes more important as companies scale. For scaleups, brand helps stabilise growth, reduce dependency on paid channels, and support future funding or exit narratives.
Do investors really care about brand?
Yes - particularly at Series B+, private equity, and exit stages. Brand signals future demand, differentiation, and long-term relevance, all of which affect valuation.
How should boards measure brand impact?
Boards should look beyond awareness metrics to indicators such as pricing power, customer retention, demand efficiency, and brand-led growth over time.
When should a scaleup invest seriously in brand?
Typically, when performance growth starts to plateau, CAC rises, or the business prepares for funding, PE involvement, or exit. Brand investment is most effective when tied directly to a growth strategy.
