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Brand: The most overlooked asset in Private Equity?
Strategy perspective
AI disruption, market volatility, and fierce competition are forcing private equity firms to rethink their value-creation strategies. Traditional levers still matter, but they no longer deliver the returns they once did. Increasingly, brand is emerging as one of the most underused yet highest-impact assets in PE portfolios. A strong brand:
- Accelerates revenue
- Lowers acquisition costs
- Strengthens pricing power
- Attracts better talent
- Supports higher exit multiples
All and all, it creates commercial momentum, and commercial momentum drives valuation. Despite this, many in PE still view brand as a logo or marketing activity. In reality, brand is the alignment of strategy, leadership, culture, product, and go-to-market. When these elements reinforce each other, companies move faster, reduce friction, and execute more consistently. This alignment compresses the value-creation timeline.
—Brand drives the variables that matter most to private equity: growth, pricing power, and valuation. When the brand is clear, the business becomes easier to scale and easier to sell.
Brand, a value-creation engine
Brand strength also creates resilience, the attribute the market now rewards most. Strong brands adapt quickly to technological change, retain customers in uncertain conditions, and stand out in saturated categories. This relevance translates into loyalty, margin expansion, and premium valuations.
Most portfolio companies, however, carry “brand debt” legacy perceptions, inconsistent messaging, fragmented experiences, and unclear value propositions. Addressing this unlocks new segments, new markets, stronger competitive positioning, and clearer paths to commercial acceleration. This is when brand becomes measurable, not abstract.
To turn brand into a value-creation engine, PE firms increasingly anchor it in tangible commercial outcomes: better win rates, shorter sales cycles, more efficient acquisition, stronger pricing, and improved talent performance. Positioning then becomes the strategic focus point that guides growth decisions and go-to-market alignment. When leadership and culture rally behind the brand, speed increases, and speed compounds.
Ignoring brand is one of the most common missed opportunities in private equity. It slows commercial traction, weakens integration, blurs the growth story, and reduces perceived value at exit. In a compressed investment timeline, delay comes at a direct cost.
The PE firms that outperform in the coming decade will treat brand as a strategic asset and a multiplier of valuation. Brand is not decoration. It is performance infrastructure, and a defining advantage in a disruptive era.