The realization of a 92% correlation between compounded National Brand values & Gross Domestic Product [GDP] per capita enticed UNIDO to acclaim that brands create prosperity and engaged into full support of ISO20671 standard for good brand management practice, released in March 2019. It lays the Best Practice structure out from clustering local businesses interests to the ones of its regions‘ interest creating a worthwhile living environment for people‘s life there. Hence the standard‘s 8 treasures emphasize on Legal resilience, the effectiveness of Marketing by trustworthy Communications, the employees’ YOGL [years of good life] Index, the satisfaction of Markets’ expectations, FKF, Quality of Services and Products. Brands make products & services more distinguishable! Encouragingly Brands strive increasingly towards a healthier world through environmental protection becoming more and more a concern of people in developed societies.

Looking at the redistribution in Brand Registrations one finds tourism councils, authorities, chambers, companies with regional products who establish regional brands! An aspect, China seeming to be emphasizing on strongly by digging out its ancient culture giving local identity to people receptive to building their future onto a tradition of their home territories, easy to identify with. In the last two decades rather unusual, an incoming successor of Austrian VOEST steel foundry CEO focusing on the company‘s employees in an inauguration interview, gives an excellent example for employer‘s branding. Businesses entice infrastructure and bring purchase-power into their regions. In today‘s globalized world people‘s aspirations for an identification with their places of comfort, family shelter and predictable neighborhoods is not unnatural. Although urbanization has brought wealth to many among us warming up weather situations put a lot of stress onto life in cities that have become poor in natural evaporation surfaces. Now even in Europe majors start talking about cooling measures by mist spraying from e.g. from lamp posts etc. By the way, this had been designed by some Austrian architects and originally tested at large scale in Singapore recreation areas.

Digital connectivity on the one hand side brings the world into our even most intimate spheres providing online shopping, versatile information, learning opportunities as well as entertainment. Nevertheless in hot and sticky climate zones as well as very cold winter destinations shopping worlds having evolved towards big brands ‘outlet and entertainment centers became weekend destinations for their local populations. Although architects strive to give each of these places  unique attractions they sometimes seem to deliver illusions of being in famous places of our world alike Venice or other historic metropoles’ signature squares or shopping streets. This may either refresh people’s memories from having traveled to the original places before or help their imagination of how it might look if they ever traveled there. Actually these are very good examples of location brands’ authenticity being marketed since quite a while. Very likely malls will have to develop a lot more concepts to fulfill their clientele‘s desires for imaginary experiences from going places giving City branding strategies new „outlets“ to position themselves as destinations or even deliver licensable design concepts for mall designers.

So the year of publishing for the ISO20761 standard might really become a historical date in a few years retrospectively. The assessment of Brand values by a standardized procedure allowing comparative benchmarking has also become a necessity for regular impairment tests on itemized Goodwill allocations on corporate balance sheets, protecting businesses from obstructive or malicious bankers’ credibility judgements. Compared to 20 years ago the practice of allocating Intangible Assets acquired into specific balance sheet positions for which now standardized evaluation procedures have been established, they became specifically measurable assets classes. Unfortunately up to now there is an inequality between businesses creating intangible assets and those who prefer to be fastest second by buying them in at some point in time. If economies want to enhance prosperity of its economy they should actually install incentives for their innovators. Since innovations define themselves as creations of new or additional values to society they generate qualitative growth. And the most important condition precedent for that is the Human Capital employed by a business. Employer branding actually relates to this aspect.

But unlike Fixed Asset values for plant and machinery capacities, the Human Capital of entities obliged to report balance sheets does not appear. Nor did we see any standards exist for it yet. In times of increasing knowledge work that might turn out as fatal mistake by economic regimes.