Brand equity is the part of a business value that does not appear on the balance sheet but shows up everywhere else: in the price customers will pay, the deals that come in without outbound, the cost per acquisition that drops as the brand grows, the retention that holds when competitors discount.
For agencies, brand equity is the long game that performance marketing cannot replace. A campaign can pull demand forward by a quarter; brand investment shifts the entire baseline. The trick is that you cannot prove this on a 30-day attribution window, which is why brand work is the first to be cut in a soft quarter.
Measure it imperfectly rather than not at all. Aided and unaided recall, branded-search volume, share of voice, and price elasticity by segment are all flawed proxies — together, tracked over time, they tell a story that a single quarter ROAS cannot.