Brand Equity Management in Vietnamese Enterprises: From Awareness to Implementation

Brand equity is widely acknowledged as one of the most valuable intangible assets a firm can hold. In Vietnam, however, a substantial gap persists between acknowledging the importance of brands and managing them as measurable assets subject to resource allocation and managerial accountability. This paper identifies and explains the awareness–implementation gap in brand equity management among Vietnamese enterprises. It employs an integrative literature review combined with secondary data analysis drawing on Brand Finance valuation reports, the results of the Vietnam Value National Brand Programme, the annual reports of the Intellectual Property Office of Vietnam, and the relevant body of legislation and accounting standards. Building on the resource-based view, the market-based assets framework and customer-based brand equity models, the paper proposes a five-pillar analytical framework — leadership awareness, strategy and positioning, organisation and process, resources and investment, and measurement and legal protection — which is used to contrast declared awareness with actual practice. The analysis finds that awareness at the leadership level has improved markedly, whereas implementation remains confined to visual identity and campaign communication, with five bottlenecks left unresolved: the absence of documented positioning strategies; the lack of organisational structures and decision rights for the brand function; the treatment of brand investment as short-term expenditure; the absence of periodic measurement; and the separation of intellectual property management from brand management. These bottlenecks are attributed to three groups of causes — organisational capability, incentive structures, and institutional conditions — from which the paper derives a four-stage roadmap for firms and four groups of policy implications.