Abstract
Research on voluntary disclosure highlights the role of informative financial reporting for capital markets. Information asymmetry impedes the efficient allocation of resources in capital markets while credible disclosure between managers and investors plays an important role in mitigating these problems. Existing research provides limited insight into firms’ disclosure of information about their market-based assets such as brands, although brand is an important part of firms’ value proposition. This study aims to fill this research gap by investigating brand-related information (BRI) disclosure in US firms’ annual reports with three research steps. First, we develop the conceptualization of BRI, based on which, we build a BRI coding dictionary. We then conduct text mining on 10-K reports and construct a BRI disclosure index to capture the BRI disclosure level in firms’ 10-K reports. In the third step, we intend to explore the key factors driving BRI disclosure as well as its financial market consequences. We propose to empirically investigate how different levels of BRI disclosure are explained by firm characteristics and actual brand performance. We will also examine how BRI disclosure influences firm value, as well as the role that BRI disclosure plays in explaining the relationship between brand performance and firm value. This study fills the research gap in the field of information disclosure concerning BRI by conceptualizing a BRI framework and providing evidence on whether firms disclose BRI in financial reporting. This study will also contribute to marketing-finance literature by empirically investigating the informational value of BRI disclosure to firm value. The findings will provide managers and financial market participants (e.g., analysts, investors) who need to communicate and evaluate the performance implications of branding strategies and related activities with enlightenment on the value relevance of BRI disclosures. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.