Intangible assets remain definition bound and thus subjective. In brand and design practice, most professionals don’t acknowledge that what they are delivering as business service is considered a difficult return on investment for their clients.

There is a lack of consistent terminology in the literature relating to intangible assets and intellectual capital.Management scholars tend to employ either “capital” or “asset” terminology to refer to investments with no physical existence.

Lawyers refer to intellectual property, which has property rights in law. Accountants do not generally use the term “intellectual capital”.

Accountants refer to identifiable intangible assets, goodwill and intellectual property (with legal rights) under the umbrella of “intangible assets”.

Economists refer to intangible assets in terms of their source, as investments, and role in production, as capital. (Hunter, Webster, Wyatt, 2005)

As business-to-business services that deliver design, brand and marketing related services, practitioners should take note of the difficulty that clients have with working out expenditure justification. I think it is therefore important to assist the client in going through a transparent process of achieving mutual goals such as I described in my earlier post about the Consensio intangible asset chain.