When it comes to intangible assets, the brand is one of the biggest items sitting on a company's balance sheet. For some, the brand name is absolutely priceless. Think Coca Cola, think GE.

But many companies struggle to create distinctive customer experiences. And many find ways to screw up the brand. Executives will talk about serving the consumer and adding value but often, their decisions achieve the opposite. They push for immediate sales, cost-cutting and profits and as a result, the consumer is often neglected or ignored. Worse still, these decisions are often couched in terms of doing the right thing for the company and even doing the right thing for the brand. The results tell another story.

Here are the 10 most common ways of screwing up a brand.

1. Leaving brand management solely to marketing or HR or operations. This has to be owned by the senior management team. Each department has a role to play and there needs to be a structure that creates an organization-wide strategy.

2. Constantly cutting the advertising budget. Very easy to do. And it doesn't mean that the advertising budget shouldn't be monitored and adjusted. But if it's routinely done, especially with the rationale of saving money without considering the costs, it might hurt the brand.

3. Segmenting by demographics or account size rather than profitability. Most organizations have mountains of data and customer research but many struggle to identify who their most profitable, as opposed to their biggest, customers are. That's the group to focus on.

4. Assuming you know what targeted customers value. A variation on the previous problem. So you know who your most profitable customers. But that's only half the story. Do you know what they value? What are the five most important attributes that see them coming back or referring other customers to you? Without the answers, all you have is a pile of data without insight.

5. Less focus on consumer research and contact. That's the opposite of the previous two problems. Cutting the consumer research budget is even easier than cutting the advertising budget. Why? Because it's less visible and information gleaned from consumer research might take years to convert into new benefits or products. Instead, many research departments have been relegated to finding new line extensions.

6. Relying on customer loyalty cards to create customer loyalty. Don't. Loyalty cards don't create loyal customers. What you get instead are promiscuous customers. Why? Because loyalty cards offer incentives and discounts that attract customers who want a "deal". The best loyalty cards are the ones that offer benefits and value-added services that will only be enjoyed by the most profitable customers.

7. Spending more on price promotions than advertising. Price promotions should be a part of any complete marketing program, but they can't replace traditional brand-building activities. Price promotions can be a dangerous game. Consumers attracted to your brand by a price promotion are just as likely to be lured away by a competitor's price promotion. What happens next week when the promotion is over and consumers are surprised to find that their beloved item now costs more? The "deal" doesn't seem like such a deal any more. As a result, you might be left with a bunch of people who feel ripped off. The trick is to find consumers who love your brand, ones who don't need be enticed to buy with promotions.

8. Relying exclusively on measures and reward systems that are volume related. Market share, profitability and earnings growth are important indicators, but what drives them are differentiation, customer loyalty and brand preference. Unfortunately, most organizations focus on the end-results and not what gets them there.

9. Sloppy approaches to measuring customer satisfaction. The only customers that really count in these ratings are the ones that give the organization a top ranking. But many companies doctor the figures. They take the customers who are "satisfied" and "somewhat satisfied" and add those to the ones who are "very satisfied" and voila! 90 per cent of their customers are satisfied. Of course, nothing is further from the truth.

10. Installing a CRM system and expecting that will do the trick. CRM aims to give businesses the means to provide preferred customers with "value propositions" that competitors can't match. From the consulting industry's point of view, there's the beauty of the system - it means more lucre for every management consultant in town flogging similar techniques to companies and their competitors. But the problem is that these systems are often installed without thinking of how the organization can use them to attract customers, and what internal behaviors the organization needs to change. Relationships cut both ways. The company might want a relationship with a high-spending customer; but is the customer looking for that sort of relationship? Subject an uninterested customer to new product offerings and telemarketing programs and things can get ugly. Even uglier when they get a letter from their bank telling them their credit card limit can be extended by $10,000 and another telling them their mortgage payments are still in arrears. A big part of the problem is that executives do not understood what they are implementing. They often just let software vendors dictate the terms of customer management or try to fit the strategy around the expensive technology. And what you have instead is a blunt instrument that stalks, rather than woos the customer.