Intangible assets now make up roughly 92 percent of the S&P 500’s total market value, according to Ocean Tomo’s 50-year Intangible Asset Market Value Study, released in February 2026 by its parent firm J.S. Held. In 1975, that split ran almost entirely the other way: tangible assets such as property, equipment, and inventory accounted for 83 percent of market value, and intangibles just 17 percent. The reversal is not limited to giant public companies. A separate academic study from Rice University and the University of Chicago found that goodwill, the accounting term for the premium a buyer pays above a target’s identifiable net assets, makes up nearly half of the aggregate value of U.S. mergers and acquisitions, and was already sitting at 4.9 trillion dollars on corporate balance sheets as of 2021.
Half of every deal, in other words, is a bet on something that does not show up on a balance sheet: reputation, customer relationships, brand strength, the trust a business has built with people who have never audited its books. That is precisely the kind of value a program like the Global Recognition Awards is built to make partly visible. The program evaluates businesses and leaders across more than 26 industry categories, publishes the criteria its judges weigh, and lists its winners publicly by year and category, which gives a buyer’s diligence team a dated, checkable data point in a category of value that otherwise has almost none.
None of this replaces a formal valuation. What it does is give the intangible side of a deal one more piece of evidence that did not come from the seller’s own pitch deck.
Goodwill is the hardest number in any deal to defend
Unlike a patent, a customer contract, or a piece of registered intellectual property, goodwill is not identified and valued on its own. It is what is left over once every other asset has been priced, a plug figure calculated by subtracting the fair value of everything else from what the buyer agreed to pay. That makes it the single largest intangible asset on corporate balance sheets in aggregate, and also the hardest one for either side of a deal to argue for or against with anything more concrete than judgment.
For a smaller or middle-market company, the company most likely to hold a program credential rather than a Fortune 500 brand name, that problem is sharper still. There is rarely a dedicated brand valuation team involved, and a seller arguing that its reputation justifies a higher multiple is, by definition, making a claim about itself. A buyer’s diligence team has to find some way to sanity-check that claim against something other than the seller’s own assertion.
A public credential gives diligence something to check against
This is where a dated, third-party listing earns a narrow but real role. It cannot quantify goodwill on its own, and no buyer’s finance team would treat it as a substitute for customer concentration data, retention metrics, or a proper quality-of-earnings report. What it can do is corroborate a qualitative claim a seller is already making in the data room: that the business has a real, recognized reputation in its category, with a specific date and evaluating body attached rather than only the seller’s own description of its standing.
That corroboration matters most in exactly the deals where it is hardest to come by otherwise: private, founder-led businesses where the brand has never been formally appraised and the only evidence of market standing is what the company says about itself. A public award listing does not settle the argument over the goodwill premium. It gives both sides one more fact to argue from instead of nothing.
A credential is evidence, not an appraisal.
None of this should be mistaken for what it is not. The Global Recognition Awards is a commercial program operated within the Baden Bower group, a public relations company with a direct financial interest in the program’s own reputation, and it charges an entry fee, a fact worth disclosing plainly in any deal conversation where the credential comes up. The program states that roughly 4 percent of applicants win, a figure that is self-reported rather than independently audited. A buyer’s team should treat the listing exactly the way it treats any other qualitative input: verifiable, worth checking, and no substitute for a real valuation exercise.
Used that way, a public credential earns a small, specific role in a negotiation where nearly half the money on the table is already, by definition, an argument rather than a fact. As more of every company’s value migrates toward things that cannot be counted or inventoried, the businesses that come to the table with independently checkable evidence for their reputation, rather than only their own account of it, will have an easier time defending the number that decides whether a deal actually closes.
