How exactly could we rank or value how “rich” a company brand is?
"Matt explains the study numbers in his answer, but those are the valuation of the brand, not the value of the company or how ""rich"" the company is.   Presuming that you're asking the value of the company, the usual way for a publicly traded company to be valued is by the market capitalization (1).  Market capitalization is a fairly simple measure, basically the total value of all the shares of stock in that company. You can find the market cap for any publicly traded company on any of the usual finance sites like Google Finance or Yahoo Finance. If by rich you mean the total value of assets (assets being all property, including cash, real property, equipment, and licenses) a company owns, that information is included in a publicly traded company's quarterly SEC filing and investor releases, but isn't usually listed on the popular finance sites. An example can be seen at Duke Energy's Investor Relation Site (the same information can be found for all companies on EDGAR, the SEC's search tool).  If you open the most recent 8-K (quarterly filing), and go to page 8, you can see that they have $33B+ in assets, and a high level breakdown of those. Note that the numbers are given in millions of dollars For a privately held company this information may or may not be available and you'd have to track it down if it is available. I picked Duke Energy because it's the first thing that popped into my mind.  I have no affiliation with Duke, and I don't directly own any of their stock." Those rankings in particular that you cite are compiled by Millward Brown and the methodology is explained like this:
"You sound like you're well educated, well spoken, and resourceful, so I'm going to assume that you are somewhere in the neighborhood of top 5% material. That means you can pretty much do anything you want to if you put enough effort into it. There are two types of people in this world: those who run the world and those who live comfortably in it (and, of course, everyone else, but they are irrelevant to the discussion). Who do you want to be? I've been around a lot of wildly successful people, and they have two consistent traits:  connections and freedom. First, everyone always told me that ""it's not what you know, it's who you know"", but I never appreciated it until after college. The world runs on connections.  The more connections you have, and the more successful they are, the more successful you will be. Second, the more freedom you have, the more opportunity you will have to take chances, which is how you become wildly successful. Freedom comes from not being in debt (first) and having money (second). Why do you think Harvard grads are the guys that end up having so much money and power? It's probably because they grew up in a rich family which provided them money (freedom) and a wide social circle of rich people (connections). So you're not rich.  What to do? Well, the easiest way to get into that group is to go to college with them. And that means you need to get into Harvard or another Ivy League. Stanford if you want to be an engineer. College will be where you will make your most intense and long-lasting friendships.  That roommate at Harvard that you went on the crazy four-day road trip with may someday be CEO of a company... and when he needs a CIO, you can be damn sure you'll be at the top of the list if you're qualified. But Harvard costs a lot of money...which means you'll be in debt, a lot, when you get out of college. You'll have lots of rich, important friends(connections), but you'll be deeply in debt (no freedom). Most of these type of people end up becoming consultants at big firms because they pay well.   You'll live a comfortable life and pay off your student loans in five or 10 years.   Then you'll continue to live comfortably,  but at that point you'll be too old to take huge chances and too comfortable to change things (or perhaps you'll have a big mortgage =  no freedom). With a heavy debt load, it's almost impossible to, say, join an early stage startup and really be able to take huge chances.  You can do it, maybe.  Or, as an alternate option, you can do what I did. Go to a cheap state school and graduate with no debt. That puts you on the other side of the fence:  freedom, but no connections.  Then, in order to be successful, you have to figure out how to get connections. Goldman Sachs won't hire you, and everyone you meet is going to automatically assume you're mediocre because of where you went to college. At this point, your only option is to take big chances. Move to New York or San Francisco, offer to work for free as an intern somewhere or something.  It can be done, and it's really not too hard, you just have to have lots of spending restraint because the little money you have has to go a long way. So what are the other options? Well, some people are recommending that you think about not going to college at all. That will certainly save you money and give you a four year head start on whatever you decide to do (freedom), but you'll forever be branded as that guy without a college degree.  Think my second option above but just two or three times worse.   You won't even get that free internship, and you'll be that weird guy at dinner parties who can""t answer the first question ""So, where did you go to college?"".  It doesn't matter if you're self-taught;  life isn't a meritocracy.  If you're very good, you'll end up getting a nice cushy job pushing ones and zeros. A nice cushy golden handcuff job. Well, you could go to community college. They're certainly cheap. You can spend very little money so you'll end up with fairly good freedom.   I might add, though, that community colleges teach trades, and not high-level things like management and complex architecture.   You'll be behind technically, but not as bad as if you didn't go at all. How about connections? Your fellow students will probably lack ambition, money, and connections. They'll be candidates for entry-level wage slave jobs at Fortune 500 companies after they graduate. If they get lucky, they'll work up to middle management. There's no alumni association, and there's certainly no ""DeVry Club"" in downtown Boston. At New York and Silicon Valley dinner parties, having a community college degree is almost as bad as having nothing at all.  Indeed, the entire value of the community college degree will be what you learn, and you'll be learning at the speed and level of your classmates. My advice? If you get into an Ivy League school, go and hope you get some grants to help you out. The debt will suck, but you'll be well positioned for the future. Otherwise, go to a cheap second-tier school where you can get a large scholarship. There are also lots of third-party scholarships that are out there on the Internet you can get. I got a couple from local organizations. Don't work during college. Focus on expanding your network instead; the future value of a minimum wage job while you're trying to go through school is practically zero." Look at Price/book value and there are more than a few stocks that may have a P/B under 1 so this does happen. There are at least a couple of other factors you aren't considering here: Current liabilities - How much money is the company losing each quarter that may cause it to sell repeatedly. If the company is burning through $100 million/quarter that asset is only going to keep the lights on for another 2.5 years so consider what assumptions you make about the company's cash flow here. The asset itself - Is the price really fixed or could it be flexible? Could the asset seen as being worth $1 billion today be worth much less in another year or two? As an example, suppose the asset was a building and then real estate values drop by 40% in that area. Now, what was worth $1 billion may now be worth only $600 million. As something of a final note, you don't state where the $100 million went that the company received as if that was burned for operations, now the company's position on the asset is $900 million as it only holds a 90% stake though I'd argue my 2 previous points are really worth noting. The Following 6 Stocks Are Trading At or Below 0.5 x Book Value–Sep 2013 has a half dozen examples of how this is possible. If the $100 million was used to pay off debt, then the company doesn't have that cash and thus its assets are reduced by the cash that is gone. Depending on what the plant is producing the value may or may not stay where it is. If you want an example to consider, how would you price automobile plants these days? If the company experiences a reduction in demand, the plant may have to be sold off at a reduced price for a cynic's view here. I have heard that people say the greater earning means greater   intrinsic value of the company. Then, the stock price is largely based   on the intrinsic value. So increasing intrinsic value due to   increasing earning will lead to increasing stock price. Does this make   sense ? Yes though it may be worth dissecting portions here. As a company generates earnings, it has various choices for what it can do with that money. It can distribute some to shareholders in the form of dividends or re-invest to generate more earnings. What you're discussing in the first part is those earnings that could be used to increase the perceived value of the company. However, there can be more than a few interpretations of how to compute a company's intrinsic value and this is how one can have opinions ranging from companies being overvalued to undervalued overall. Of Mines, Forests, and Impatience would be an article giving examples that make things a bit more complex. Consider how would you evaluate a mine, a forest or a farm where each gives a different structure to the cash flow? This could be useful in running the numbers here. Everyone is usually better off without insurance.  A very few people are much better off with insurance.  Insurance is a gamble and when you lose, you win.  Very few people lose badly enough to win.  Most people just pay money into insurance and never get as much back as they pay in.  For most people, in most lives, insurance is a bad deal.  The reason people crave insurance is because they cannot calculate the probability of something bad happening as well as an actuary can do so.  The gap in knowledge between you and and actuary is what make insurance providers rich and you poor.  They are smart, you are not.  You think some terrible thing is going to happen to you, they know it probably won't.  So they sell you a product you probably will never need.  Anyhow, most people can't understand probability, and how to analyze risk, so they won't get what I'm saying here. Understanding the real cost of risk is the first lesson in understanding money and wealth.  Rich people usually understand the value and cost of risk.  Hence, they only buy insurance when they expect to lose, that is, to win.  We rich people do everything only when we know already we are going to win.  We don't gamble, unless we are the house.  When a self-made rich man buys something, its because he knows already he is going to come out ahead on it, most probably. "What does your comment have to do with my comment? You say ""Apple only designs stuff"" as if that has some bearing on their net worth. Right now Apple's stock is worth about as much as *Google and Microsoft combined*, and they're sitting on about 60B in *cash*. They are *extremely* wealthy. They could do absolutely nothing for a very very long time and still stay in business." You are not seeing what I aim to explore.   Firstly, I am looking into whether or not CEO-charisma has any influence on consumers in their decision making process.  Secondly I want to see if their decision making process will differ between industries of certainty and industries of uncertainty.  That is why I chose a stable industry (bottled water) and an uncertain industry (computers).  In this survey I am using the Conger-Kanungo scale, which only has been used on internal analysis of the organisation so far. I want to see if the scale can be adapted to the external environment with the same results.  Edit: I just saw your second point. It does not matter who the CEO of Coke or Pepsi is. I took a hypothetical approach to reduce any bias in the survey. What a hoot. Fulgoni's people at comScore confirmed the impression value of search advertising years ago. Now Facebook is just catching on?  However, no one in online advertising is yet acknowledging the key truth that impressions are not all created equal. A tiny search ad's impression is nowhere near the value of a TV ad's impression. The man is a master at branding. He may not have been able to launch so many products had he not been born into money, but plenty of people born into wealth do not develop even one skill of that sort.   That being said, clearly he's worse than terrible at everything else though.