Growing revenue and building brand value are not the same thing. Many companies scale volume, revenue, and distribution while simultaneously weakening what makes the brand preferred, memorable, and difficult to replace.
There's a paradox that frequently comes up in leadership conversations: the company grows, hits targets, gains market share, and yet feels that the brand isn't keeping pace with that growth. Sales increase, but brand loyalty doesn't. Distribution advances, but the perception of value stagnates. The business gets bigger, and the brand becomes weaker.
It was around this tension that we wrote the paper at Anacouto. Strategic Planning 2027. One of his starting points is simple and unsettling: growth remains essential, but it is no longer enough. It is necessary to generate. brand value – For customers, for the business, and for the market—that is, the entire ecosystem. This article is a snapshot of that discussion: why do so many growing organizations simultaneously lose brand value, and what lies behind this imbalance?.
Growth is not the same as generating value.
Growth is a measure of size: more revenue, more volume, more points of sale, more customers. Brand value is a measure of strength: how much people know, prefer, and are willing to pay more for you, and how sustainable that is over time. The two should go hand in hand, but they aren't automatic. You can grow in the short term by pushing price, promotion, performance media, and distribution, without any of that building a stronger brand underneath.
The problem is what happens when that growth loses momentum. A brand that grew without building value grew on shaky ground: the moment a competitor matches the price, copies the product, or buys the same media, there's no reason left for the customer to continue choosing you. It's the trap of... commoditization When the market doesn't clearly understand what differentiates your brand, the purchase decision reverts to the easiest criteria to compare: price, delivery time, and convenience.
Market figures reinforce this point. According to the Kantar BrandZ, Between 2006 and 2025, a portfolio of the world's strongest brands appreciated by approximately 435% in share price, compared to 353% for the S&P 500 index over the same period. A strong brand is not just a gimmick for growth: it's what makes growth last. That's why the distinction is important: growing means getting bigger; generating value means becoming harder to replace.
Why brand value is lost even when the company grows.
If growth and value creation aren't the same thing, why do so many companies confuse the two? In practice, brand value erodes through paths that tend to repeat themselves.
1. Growth anchored in the product, not the brand. Many companies grow because they have an excellent product with strong cost-benefit appeal and a loyal customer base that recommends it. That's a great start, but when all perception is focused on a single product, the brand fails to build its own meaning, beyond what it currently sells. The day it needs to expand its portfolio or move to the next level, there's no brand to sustain the progress.
2. Disconnection between business strategy and branding strategy. It's common for corporate strategy to define where the company is going (markets, goals, portfolio), while the brand is treated as a separate matter, focused on communication and campaigns. When these two plans run on separate tracks, business growth doesn't translate into brand growth. We believe that effective planning arises precisely from the integration of the two: corporate strategy defines the vision for the future, and branding strategy is the engine that brings that vision to life and accelerates its progress.
3. Lack of brand value measurement. What isn't measured isn't managed. Many companies closely monitor sales, margins, and market share, but have no clear idea of how much of their revenue comes from brand strength, nor whether that strength is growing or shrinking. Without this barometer, the brand only enters the conversation as a cost line item, never as an asset that generates value. It was to answer this that we created the... Valometry®, a tool that translates brand strength into business language, with the Branding Value Score (BVS) measuring value creation over time.
The Herbíssimo case: growing without leaving the mark behind.
A Herbíssimo This is a good example of how this mismatch manifests in practice and how it is resolved. The brand is a leader in the cream deodorant category, the fourth largest deodorant brand in Brazil, and a true phenomenon on TikTok, with a fan community so passionate that many jokingly asked the brand... no to become too famous. It is also the driving force behind Dana Cosmetics: by far the company's main growth driver.
And yet, the growth brought a paradox. Herbíssimo's image was strongly associated with the product (excellent and well-known), but without a clear and evident brand positioning. It was loved because of the little jar, not because of its own intrinsic meaning. An almost perfect case of the thesis of this article: a brand that grew a lot and, at the same time, ran the risk of not building brand value proportional to that size and even of losing the emotional connection with its loyal base if it popularized in the wrong way.
The rebranding effort stemmed from this tension: to grow, win over new consumers, and evolve from a category icon into a cosmetics brand, without breaking the sense of belonging that built the community. The brand gained its own territory, its purpose. “"High self-esteem that manifests in the body"” and an irreverent personality translated into the tagline “"Most herbivorous. Most powerful."”. It went from being a beloved product to becoming a brand with clear meaning, capable of supporting a broader portfolio and competing on equal footing with the major players in the beauty industry. Growth and brand value are once again going hand in hand. (See the Herbíssimo's complete case study..)
Purpose: the link between growth and value creation.
If brand value is lost through disconnection, it is recovered through integration. For us, the purpose It is the link that unites corporate strategy and branding strategy: the guiding principle that keeps business decisions and brand decisions pointing in the same direction. It prevents growth from happening on one side while the brand is managed on the other.
This integration doesn't happen by chance; it needs to be formalized in a... strategic planning That treats the brand as part of the growth strategy, and not as a consequence of it. That's where the brand ceases to be just a communication cost and becomes what sustains preference, protects margins, and makes the customer return. Consistency generates memory; memory generates preference; preference generates growth, this time, growth that builds value instead of eroding it.
At Anacouto, this is how we see the problem: companies don't lose brand value by growing too much, but rather by growing disconnected from their own brand. Healthy growth is what carries the brand along, making it, with each step, more well-known, more preferred, and harder to replace.
Is your company growing in revenue and building brand value at the same rate? For an in-depth assessment, speak with an Anacouto specialist.
