---
title: "Governing the intangible: how, in fifty years, we moved from plants and warehouses to an entire estate of intangible assets"
canonical: "https://blissagency.it/en/brand-governance-en/governing-intangible-assets/"
url: "https://blissagency.it/en/brand-governance-en/governing-intangible-assets/md/"
site: "Bliss"
published: "2026-10-02T04:40:25+02:00"
modified: "2026-10-10T16:55:20+02:00"
language: "en-US"
description: "The greatest revolution of the last 50 years has overturned the logic of assets: from tangible to intangible. Here is what changes for companies"
section: "Governance del Brand"
---

# Governing the intangible: how, in fifty years, we moved from plants and warehouses to an entire estate of intangible assets

Every year, [Ocean Tomo publishes the Intangible Asset Market Value Study](https://oceantomo.com/intangible-asset-market-value-study/), the world’s most cited measurement of how the value of large listed companies is composed.
The headline figure of the 2025 study, which covers half a century of data on the US market, describes a transformation with few precedents in modern economic history.

**In 1975, tangible assets (that is, property, plant, machinery and warehouses) accounted for 83% of the market value of companies in the S&P 500 index. **
**So-called intangible assets stood at a mere 17%.**
**By the end of 2025, however, that ratio had been reversed: today intangible assets account for 92% of market capitalisation. Tangible assets have fallen to 8%.**

The most radical economic reversal of the last century has taken place within a single working life. A company’s value now lies in something that barely existed yesterday.
Yet most organisations continue to govern their intangible assets with tools designed to manage plants and warehouses. And it shows.

Here is the story of how it happened, and what it means for companies that want to grow.

## What intangible assets are

The term may sound abstract, but the concept of an «intangible asset» is very precise and covers clearly defined items, grouping together:

- intellectual property (trademarks, patents, trade secrets);

- accumulated customer data (CRM, cookie preferences);

- in-house algorithms and software;

- relationships of trust with customers and suppliers;

- licences and concessions;

- websites and domains;

- social media profiles;

- digital reputation;

- audiovisual content;

- organisational culture;

- goodwill,

and finally the **[brand](https://blissagency.it/en/brand-governance-en/brand-meaning-examples-trademark-difference/)**: the perceived synthesis of everything a company is, communicated consistently over time.

## From tangible to intangible assets

Ocean Tomo compares the shift we have experienced over the past fifty years to the Industrial Revolution, but with one substantial difference. The Industrial Revolution took a century to complete. The intangible revolution has occurred within a single human lifetime, [with a striking acceleration between 1985 and 2005, when the intangible share of value rose from 32% to 79%: 47 percentage points in two decades](https://oceantomo.com/insights/ocean-tomo-releases-2025-intangible-asset-market-value-study-results/).

The economy has turned upside down, moving from a system in which value was measured by touch to one in which value is driven by thought.

The recent data is just as telling: between 2020 and 2025, even though the Federal Reserve carried out its most aggressive cycle of monetary tightening in forty years, the intangible share of the S&P 500’s value held steady at around 90%. Not even the harshest macroeconomic conditions reversed the trend.

## Why we pay for something we cannot touch

The principle behind this mechanism follows the logic of scalability.

A physical asset has a marginal cost of expansion that grows in line with output. Whether it is a factory, a warehouse or a fleet of lorries, producing twice as much requires almost twice the physical capacity.

An intangible asset does not work like that: an algorithm, a brand or a database can serve a million additional customers at a cost that sometimes approaches zero. This explains why technology companies and companies with a strong brand identity have reached market valuations that no traditional manufacturer with the same turnover has ever dreamed of achieving (see OpenAI and Anthropic).

**Today, value no longer lives in what a company holds in its hands. It lies entirely in what that company knows: in who trusts it, too, and in how it is perceived by those who have yet to become its customers.**

## The problem of intangibility

And yet our capacity for governance has not kept pace.

Progress has moved too fast, and today traditional accounting systems, built to measure factories and warehouses, are still inadequate for measuring that 92% of invisible (or almost invisible) value.

A registered patent appears on the balance sheet, whereas a community’s trust, the quality of the data collected and online reputation have no metrics of any kind. This creates a blind spot, with organisations continuing to measure what is worth less and less, and to underestimate what is worth more and more.

## How intangible assets are governed

Governing a physical asset means protecting it from theft, deterioration and obsolescence, and investing to keep it productive. Governing an intangible asset, by contrast, demands a different discipline.

Not least because, here, the main risk is not deterioration but inconsistency.

Contradictory messages across different channels, broken promises, choices that stray from the brand’s objectives. But also under-exploited CRMs, neglected communities, websites that communicate poorly.

**Governing the intangible is, above all else, a discipline of consistency. It requires every decision to be tested against a direction defined in advance, rather than simply improvised in response to the pressures of the moment.**

## What changes for companies that govern the intangible

The transformation measured by Ocean Tomo is a precise description of where the real value of any organisation lies today, regardless of its sector or size.

**Companies that have built rigorous systems to manage warehouses, plants and cash flows, yet continue to manage brands, data and market relationships without the same discipline, are applying the standards of 1975 to an economy that has since been turned completely on its head.**

**Assets worth 92% deserve the same level of governance that for decades was reserved for those now worth a mere 8%. And the time to change things is now.**

---

## New Connections (FAQ)

### Our company isn’t listed on the stock exchange. Does this S&P 500 figure really concern us?

*Yes, because the economic mechanism described is not exclusive to listed companies; it is a structural feature of the contemporary economy. Even a mid-sized private company today builds most of its real value on its brand, customer relationships, proprietary data and reputation, rather than on plant and inventory. The difference is that listed companies have a market that measures that value every day. Private companies often discover what their intangible assets were really worth only at the point of sale, when it is too late to build them better.*

### How is the value of a company’s intangible assets measured in practice?

*There is no single, universal metric, but there are reliable indicators for each component. For the brand, you measure recognisability, perceived consistency across channels, and the customer’s willingness to pay a price premium over a generic alternative. For proprietary data, you measure their quality, their uniqueness compared with what is publicly available, and how effectively they are turned into operational decisions. For customer relationships, you measure loyalty over time and the propensity for spontaneous recommendation. None of these indicators appears automatically in a traditional balance sheet: they require a purpose-built measurement system.*

### In practical terms, where do you start in building governance for your intangible assets?

*With mapping. Before any intervention, an organisation needs clarity on which intangible assets it actually owns: what data, what reputation, what level of consistency in its current communication. Most organisations have never carried out this exercise systematically, and in doing so they discover that their intangible assets are richer, but also more disorganised, than they thought. Only after this mapping does it make sense to build a system of rules, a governance framework, that protects those assets and makes them grow with the same discipline reserved for decades for physical assets.*