Alex: Donatella, we have worked together for over a decade. My thesis is simple: brand is the most underrated value driver in a private equity deal. Do you agree?
 Donatella: Its importance can be undervalued, yes. The challenge is where the responsibility sits inside an organisation. Brand is too often treated as something that only belongs to the marketing department. But the times it genuinely creates value are when it is handled as a strategic matter at board level, when it is allowed to help shape where the business is going. That is an altogether different thing. “Brand is too often treated as something that only belongs to the marketing department. But the times it genuinely creates value are when it is handled as a strategic matter at board level, when it is allowed to help shape where the business is going. That is an altogether different thing." Alex: Our experience, gathered over those ten years, is that strategic brand development done together with financial discipline can lift enterprise value by something in the order of three per cent on a sale to an industrial buyer, and rather more in a flotation. Do you recognise that effect? Donatella: I am cautious about precise figures; it depends on the business and the deal. But the mechanism I recognise very well. A buyer is paying for a future, not merely for a set of results. If a business can tell a credible and coherent story about where it is heading, and if that story is borne out in how the business is actually run, the buyer's perceived risk falls. Lower perceived risk means a higher multiple. That it could land in the region you describe does not surprise me in the least. Alex: Where do you see the work making the most difference in practice? Donatella: Four situations recur. In mergers, where a shared narrative can be the difference between two companies living side by side and one company that has genuinely become one. In carve-outs, where a new identity needs to express a new commercial strategy rather than simply change the logo. In capturing synergies on the marketing side, which often lie untouched long after the financial synergies have been banked. And in building and clarifying intangible assets, the things that actually remain on the balance sheet once the deal is done. It is not always the first lever an owner considers, but it ought to be considered early. Alex: Why, then, is the potential so seldom realised, if the logic is this clear? Donatella: Because it falls between two stools. Finance might regard brand as soft and hard to measure while creatives regard commercial logic as someone else's concern. The best outcome often comes from the two disciplines working together from the outset, but that is rarer than one might think. When it does happen, the result is often tangible. When it does not, value can be left on the table quite needlessly. Alex: If you could give an owner a single piece of advice? Donatella: Bring the brand question in early, at the point of the investment thesis, not in the closing stages before an exit. Those who wait until the final year are trying to repaint the façade just before the viewing. Those who start on day one are building a house that is genuinely worth more, and the difference can show up in price.