[Yeung and Ramasamy’s 2007 study in the ](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/305007816_Brand_value_and_firm_performance_nexus_Further_empirical_evidence)[Journal of Brand Management](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/305007816_Brand_value_and_firm_performance_nexus_Further_empirical_evidence)[ ](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/305007816_Brand_value_and_firm_performance_nexus_Further_empirical_evidence)looked at the top US firms on the BusinessWeek/Interbrand Global Brands list. It found a clear pattern:

Stronger brands were associated with higher profitability.

This 2007 paper kicked off a stream of follow-up research. All of them have only reinforced this original finding.

But could it just be correlation? And not causation?

A panel-regression study conducted few years after the 2007 paper - using the same Interbrand universe - found out that the brand value itself was a significant driver of profitability, not just a byproduct of it.

Hope that settles the correlation / causation question. The studies are many. The conclusion is always the same: stronger brand → more profitable business. And going beyond B2C, this is equally applicable to B2B, tech & deeptech (here’s another definitive proof).

What explains the “brand impact” on B2B, tech & deeptech’s growth and profitability?

The instinct is that technical buyers are immune to narrative — they read the whitepaper, run the benchmark, and decide. Bud do they?

B2B Customer Needs

Think about it - B2B technical buying committees are larger, slower, and more risk-averse than consumer purchases, right? What this means is that a large number of folks on the buying side - who are not the best suited for technical evaluation - are still weighing in. These are folks from procurement, the CFO or the VP who has to defend the choice upward. What do you really think influences them more? Technical benchmarks claiming product superiority or a story well told, backed by product capabilities?

Deeptech compounds this need even further.

When the underlying technology is genuinely hard to evaluate — a new chip architecture, a novel materials process, a model nobody outside the lab fully understands — buyers, investors, and journalists default to whoever has made the category legible. Whoever has put in the effort to tell a defensible and memorable story. The one who sold the brand before the product.

And that’s how brand directly impacts the business.

Storytelling is an important route to brand-building

Many confuse brand-building as purely storytelling. It’s not. There is more at play, and storytelling is one part of it, albeit an important one.

A brand gets built (or ruined) through the following four primary routes:

1. The product / service that the firm sells and how the buyer / users like it (from buying the experience to using experience)

2. The stories the firm tells about the company and its products / services - while maintaining consistency in language, associations, evoked feelings and visuals - basically everything one can talk, write and make videos about (be it in events, on our website or social media - there are many channels to tell stories) - this also includes all marketing activities:

   • sales-focus (lead-gen, performance marketing etc) - note that even when the purpose of this is sales, it also creates avenue to build brand

   • brand-marketing - the effort directly gone into building contextual awareness about the brand and the product / offering / service, in the vast majority of the prospects that will not buy today, but may buy tomorrow (they need to both remember us and know when to reach out to us and why - when the time is right)

3. The stories others tell about the firm and its products - publicly (the stories that one carries in their mind, is the brand itself) - we can influence it but unless we are autocratic kings, we can’t control it

4. Other visible actions and the socio-economic-political stance and decisions taken by the firm and the leaders (action, not mere talk)

What makes the storytelling route special is that it offers a high point of leverage, differentiation and control

But two things are important for it to work - defensibility and consistency.

Defensible means it’s built on something true and durable — a distinctive POV, a technical insight, a structural market shift, a real constraint you solve that others don’t — not a meaningless undefendable slogan for the sake of it. One that collapses under scrutiny from a smart buyer.

Consistency means the same three or four ideas show up in your pitch deck, your product docs, your conference talk, and your CEO’s LinkedIn post, instead of a different message every quarter chasing the latest trend.

The real unlock is the third part: getting others to carry the narrative for you. That’s an analyst using your framing in a market report. A customer describing their own problem in your vocabulary before you’ve said a word. A competitor forced to define themselves in relation to the category you named.

When your language becomes the industry’s default vocabulary, you don’t have to sell too hard. You get to set the terms of the conversation. Every deal starts on your home turf.

The bottomline

The research is consistent across two decades, multiple methodologies, and general and tech-specific samples: stronger brands track with higher profitability and better risk-adjusted returns.

For B2B, tech and deeptech companies, the fastest path to success is picking a narrative you can defend, saying it relentlessly, and building the kind of clarity that other people start repeating on your behalf.

That’s why we do what we do at Story99.

-Amrit (Founder)

Story99.com is a Branding & Storytelling Consultancy for B2B, Tech & Deeptech

Research papers with supporting conclusions:

• A separate 2023 study used a different statistical technique (fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis) on the same dataset and reached a similar conclusion, adding a governance twist: companies with weaker internal alignment and more agency conflict tended to have weaker brands too. Translation: brand strength isn’t just a marketing output, it’s a signal of organizational coherence.

• A study using the Fama-French three-factor model (plus a momentum factor) — the standard toolkit for explaining stock returns after removing known risk premiums — looked at US firms with strong brands on Interbrand’s list from 1994 to 2006. It found these firms delivered statistically and economically significant above-average stock returns, even after adjusting for risk. That’s not “brand feels good.” That’s “brand shows up in a risk-adjusted alpha calculation that professional asset managers use to justify a trade.”

• A study zooming in specifically on the top five high-tech firms on Interbrand’s list each year from 2012 to 2019 found a statistically significant positive relationship between brand value and market performance indicators within that sector. The tech-specific replication matters, because the objection to all of this is usually “sure, but that’s Coca-Cola and Marlboro — my buyers are engineers, not moms with a shopping cart.” The data says the pattern holds in a highly technical, spec-driven sector too.

• A 2019 study out of Germany took a different angle entirely, proxying brand equity through trademark filing activity instead of relying on Interbrand’s proprietary scores. It found meaningful correlation with Interbrand’s own brand rankings, and — tellingly — that the profitability contribution of brand equity was highly skewed: a small number of firms that invested deliberately in brand captured most of the benefit. Brand equity isn’t ambient. It’s concentrated in the hands of companies that actually work at it.