We used to live in the attention economy. Get eyeballs, get clicks, win. That world is gone. We’re in the trust economy now, and AI is the reason. But how should you build brand authority, and what is brand authority worth?

Scroll social media for five minutes and you’ll question almost everything you see. Real, staged, AI-generated, who knows. But run due diligence on a company, and something strange happens: people trust the AI’s answer. AI isn’t infallible. It’s just very good at contextualizing and weighting what other people, real third parties, are already saying about a business. It’s excellent at reading the room.

That shift is why brand authority is the thing deciding who gets chosen right now.

What Brand Authority Actually Is

Here’s the test I use, and it has nothing to do with follower counts or how many people “like” you.

Brand authority comes down to two questions. What does this brand do that no other brand does in quite the same way? And what do the audiences that matter most, customers, investors, acquirers, need to understand or believe to act? Where the answers to those two questions overlap, that’s your narrative territory. Everything else is tactics.

At Avaans, we run this exercise as the Fingerprint Strategy: a genuine audit of what makes a brand distinct, not the marketing positioning written to sound broadly appealing, but the actual operational or philosophical difference a sharp journalist or a sophisticated buyer would find genuinely interesting. It has to be real. You can’t build narrative on top of something you can’t defensibly own.

And the tell for whether it’s working isn’t engagement. It’s Share of Voice, how often people with no vested interest bring your brand into conversations you didn’t start. When your Share of Voice outpaces your actual share of the market, that’s a leading indicator of where market share is headed next.

A Clip Is Not an Asset

Most PR chases the wrong thing. A competitor lands a great placement, a peer company gets acquired at a number that makes everyone jealous, and the instinct is: what did they do, let’s copy it. That’s the wrong approach, and it’s one of the most consistent reasons authority never materializes.

Activity-based PR, pitching news hooks, chasing trends, responding to journalist requests with no strategic filter, produces coverage. But without an underlying thread, every placement is a standalone event. Coverage without coherence is just noise.

What is brand authority worth?A clip is what activity-based PR gets you. An asset is what you get when every piece of coverage is placed with intention, around the same narrative, in service of a specific business outcome. One evaporates. The other grows into something a buyer, an investor, or a journalist can recognize on sight.

Your Product Isn’t the Moat You Think It Is

Here’s something founders resist hearing: nearly every product-level advantage is copyable. Ingredients, code, formulations, most of what goes into building a product isn’t actually proprietary. Reverse engineering is real, and if your product succeeds, competitors show up. If your whole brand rests on what’s inside the product, you’ll hit a wall, either in the marketplace or later, when you’re trying to sell the business.

Brand authority is the architecture that separates you when the product itself no longer can. It’s a tangible, credible differentiator that holds up under competitive pressure and adds real value to the brand, independent of what’s in the box.

What is Brand Authority Worth

Ambiguity about “brand” is expensive. It’s the reason PR budgets get cut first when a company is looking for savings. The fix isn’t a better pitch for why brand matters. It’s an actual number.

Brands with strong authority command a 15 to 40 percent price premium in their category. That premium isn’t an accident. It’s the accumulated equity of every association the brand has built, trust, quality, cultural relevance, and a real share of it traces back to brand authority. When editorial coverage and third-party validation reach a buyer before they see your price tag, paying more feels obvious. That’s PR doing valuation work.

In an M&A deal, brand equity shows up as a line item under purchase price allocation. It’s why a buyer pays $50M for a company with $8M in EBITDA instead of the $24M a pure earnings multiple would suggest. The gap is brand.

We saw this directly with a pre-IPO wellness CPG client in a regulated category. The brand’s narrative was built with intention well before the raise. The company hit a 300% stock increase on an oversubscribed IPO and generated over 10 billion impressions. That kind of outcome doesn’t come from a single placement. It comes from a narrative built with the deal room in mind long before the deal existed.

Where to Start: Know Your Baseline

Skip the placement chase. The work is building narratives that actually strengthen the brand, and that starts with knowing where you stand right now.

Before you build anything, get a real baseline. What is your brand authority worth today, in the price a buyer would pay, the premium a customer will accept, the confidence an investor walks in with? I walk through five frameworks for answering that, royalty relief, price premium, customer acquisition savings, market share trajectory, and Share of Voice, in my book, The Invisible Asset. You don’t need all five frameworks. You need the one that matches where your company actually is right now.

Once you have that number, you can walk into that budget conversation with real methodology behind you.

Common Questions About Brand Authority

What is brand authority?
Brand authority is the credibility a company has earned through consistent, third-party validation, coverage, endorsement, recognition, that positions it as a trusted, defining voice in its category. It’s measured by Share of Voice, not follower count.

How is brand authority different from brand awareness?
Awareness means people recognize your name. Authority means people trust your point of view enough to act on it, pay a premium for it, or cite it when making a decision. A brand can be widely known and have almost no authority.

Can brand authority actually be measured?
Yes. Share of Voice relative to your total market is the clearest forward-looking indicator. Beyond that, brand equity frameworks like price premium and royalty relief translate authority into a specific dollar figure.

Why does brand authority matter for valuation and M&A?
Because buyers pay for it directly. Brand equity is assessed as a distinct asset under purchase price allocation in M&A transactions, and it’s a major reason acquisition multiples exceed pure earnings multiples.

Ready to Know What Your Brand Authority Is Worth?

Most companies find out what they left on the table after the deal closes. Start with an Assessment of your brand authority.

Related reading: Thought Leadership Isn’t a Deliverable. It’s a Practice.

The Invisible Asset, written by Avaans Media founder Tara Coomans, is the PR ROI framework that builds brand equity, drives valuation, attracts capital, and wins high-stakes moments. It’s built for CMOs defending budgets, CEOs preparing for a capital event, and operators in regulated categories. Get the book →