About the Project

Project

This database is part of a research project which is currently conducted at the Kühne Logistics University (KLU) in Hamburg and the University of Cologne. In this research project, we analyze why estimated brand values differ significantly for the same brand as well as across brands and time. Executives ask whether they should invest into brand building and how to measure the financial value of brands. They would like to know which industry, market, and firm conditions favor the growth of brand value. To answer this question, we use an even larger database of over 40,000 financial brand values. These financial brand values were obtained from over 20 different brand-valuation methods covering commercial providers, academic methods as well as real market transactions. We match the brand values with financial data for parent firms from COMPUSTAT and CRSP. We apply a meta-analytic approach to reveal systematic differences in brand values that are due to time, product, geography, market, valuation approach, firm-specific and customer-specific factors

Alexander Himme is Associate Professor of Management Accounting at Kühne Logistics University. He received his PhD in Management Accounting and Marketing at the University of Kiel (Germany). He holds a Diploma in Business Administration from the University of Kiel. Before joining Kühne Logistics University in 2015, he worked as an Assistant Professor at Vlerick Business School (Belgium) and as a Post-Doc at the Universities of Cologne and Passau (Germany). At the University of Cologne he received his cumulative habilitation. In addition, Alexander Himme spent one year as a Visiting Scholar at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University and the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA).

Himme's specialization is on the field of performance measurement, valuation of intangibles, marketing accounting, and cost management. His work is positioned at the accounting-marketing interface. In this context his research deals with the influence of intangibles on accounting metrics like the cost of capital. The aim of the research is to quantify the return of investments in intangible assets like brands, customer equity, or corporate reputation. For determining the return of investments in intangible assets his research also focuses on ways how to measure and to evaluate these assets. Determining the drivers of a successful cost management is another pillar of his research projects. His research has been published among others in Journal of Marketing, International Journal of Research in Marketing, Journal of Management Control, Journal of Business Economics, and Journal of Cost Management. He has also presented his work at major international conferences (e.g., Congress of the European Accounting Association, Marketing Science Conference, Marketing Strategy Meets Wall Street). His work was finalist for the Best Paper Award of the German Academic Association for Business Research (VHB) in 2019 and received the Best Paper Award of the EIASM Interdisciplinary Workshop on Intangibles & Intellectual Capital in 2018. He further won best teaching awards at KLU.

Himme has taught at the Universities of Kiel, Passau, Cologne as well as at the Corvinus University in Budapest, Vlerick Business School in Ghent/Leuven/St. Petersburg, and the State University of Management in Moscow. He has taught diverse financial, managerial, and marketing accounting classes in bachelor, master, and executive programs. Himme has visited several teaching seminars that deal with the case study method (e.g., case method teaching seminar by Harvard Business Publishing) and combines theory-based teaching with a passionate way of teaching case studies.

Selected Publications

Edeling, Alexander and Alexander Himme (2018): When Does Market Share Matter? New Empirical Generalizations from a Meta-Analysis of the Market Share-Performance Relationship, Journal of Marketing, 82 (3): 1-24.

Fischer, Marc and Alexander Himme (2017): The Financial Brand Value Chain: How Brand Investments Contribute to the Financial Health of Firms, International Journal of Research in Marketing, 34 (1): 137-153.

Himme, Alexander and Marc Fischer (2014): Drivers of the Cost of Capital: The Joint Role of Non-Financial Metrics, International Journal of Research in Marketing, 31 (2): 224-238.

Contact

Tel: +49 40 328707-225
Fax: +49 40 328707-209
E-Mail: alexander.himme@the-klu.org