This BS Brand Didn't Bear Up

Our friends at Cake Financial (a company that Eat My Words named), have a post on their dishy blog concerning the recent bad news about Bear Stearns. (While on the subject, we are enjoying "The Slice", Cake Financial's weekly market summary video starring Steve and Sven that is funny and destined for Internet immortality.) The Bear Stearns financial fallout resulted in a reduction in market cap from the 52 week high of $21.7 billion on April 25, 2007, to a low of $386 million on March 17, 2008 .

What ultimately will happen with the firm started by Joseph Bear and Robert Stearns in 1923 is not yet clear, but it is safe to say it will not ever recapture it's prominent position on wall street, it's market value, or (the ultimate point of this post), it's brand value.

As recently as the third quarter of 2007, Corebrand ranked Bear Stearns #429 in it's regular BrandPower Rankings ( Between US Bancorpand Deutsche Bank, to put it in perspective). According to Corebrand, BrandPower is "a single-score measure of the size and quality (familiarity and favorability) of a company’s reputation. It’s a measure of brand equity presented in both historical and competitive context. "

Our guess is that it will most likely (O.K., for sure) drop off the list altogether next time CoreBrand does their rankings.

While this is an extreme example, a significant portion of the aforementioned market cap freefall can be attributed to the intangible value of Bear Stearns which includes its "brand".

Perhaps Bear Stearns will take the time honored path of changing its name to distance itself from its own past, or just quietly fold into the paternal hands of its savior, JP Morgan. If you want to change your name and rebuild a new brand, Bear Stearns, we're here for you. Eat My Words specializes in creating names that score immediate (to use CoreBrand's words) familiarity and favorability. We're all about helping a company build its brand from the start with a name that creates buzz, which creates publicity, which creates business, which creates revenue, which creates brand value.

To put it mathematically:

EMW = ROI