More than your CFO will admit. Less than your brand team hopes.
The real answer lives somewhere in between, and the reason it's hard to nail down is that the thing doing the most work is almost impossible to put on a balance sheet.
Here's what we know: acquirers pay premiums for businesses that are easy to understand. A clear name, a coherent story, a portfolio that explains itself without a slide deck. Those things feel soft. They're not.
When perception is muddled, due diligence gets harder. Questions multiply. Confidence thins. And in a deal, confidence is currency.
The part most companies miss is that language does the heavy lifting long before any valuation model opens. What a company is called, how its products relate to each other, whether the name signals the right category to the right buyer: these aren't aesthetic decisions. They're structural ones. Language is the first infrastructure perception runs on. Get it wrong, and every downstream impression is working against you.
Think about it from the buyer's side. Two businesses, similar EBITDA, similar growth. One has a name that signals premium, precision, and market maturity. The other sounds like a placeholder that never got replaced. The numbers might be identical. The story isn't. And story affects offer price.
Intangibles aren't unquantifiable. They're just harder to trace. Brand equity shows up in customer retention. In pricing power. In how quickly a sales team can open a conversation. Those outcomes are measurable. They just rarely get credited back to the name.
The tough truth for anyone trying to defend brand investment on a spreadsheet: the ROI doesn't live in one line item. It's distributed across the business, often invisible until it's absent.
Strong naming and brand language compress the time it takes for people to trust you. And trust, at scale, has a number.