Along with Britpop, curtain hairstyles and lad culture, the Balanced Scorecard was wildly popular in the 1990s.
Or at least so it seemed to me.
I was working in brand valuation and wrestling with the idea of how to bring together financial and non-financial measures of brand performance in a single framework in a way that felt vaguely sensible. The problem is a thorny one. Financial measures are loved by brand owners because they are ‘hard’ metrics that shareholders care about: what level of sales did we achieve in the past quarter? How much did each sale cost us? What...