WPP and Kantar Millward Brown released yesterday the 2017 BrandZ Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands ranking. As the largest and definitive brand-building platform in the world, BrandZ reflects the brands that are integrated into today’s consumer lifestyles. It is the only brand valuation study to combine interviews with over three million consumers globally with analysis of the financial and business performance of each company (using data from Bloomberg and Kantar Worldpanel).

This year, the total brand value of the Top 100 brands has risen +8 per cent to $3.64 trillion, compared with +3 per cent in 2016, while the number of brands worth more than $100bn has increased from six to nine.

By: gulfmarketingreview

The total brand value of the ranking is up +152 per cent from 2006 (its first year), as its composition has shifted towards innovative, consumer-focused technology brands with huge reach and brand-building power.

The BrandZ Top 10 in 2017 are worth almost as much as the entire Top 100 in 2006 ($1.42tn vs $1.44tn), and have grown +249 per cent in value, compared with +152 per cent for the Top 100 as a whole.

The value of the BrandZ Top 100 Global Brands confirms that strong brands continue to outperform their competitors. Compared against key benchmarks over the past 12 years, the portfolio of BrandZ Top 100 brands grew 50 per cent more in value than the S&P 500 and 3.5 times the MSCI All Country World Index.

The 2017 ranking shows that the balance of power has truly tipped towards the consumer-focused technology brands that develop ecosystems that cater to many needs, simplifying an increasingly complex world. More than half of the Top 100’s total brand value is contributed by technology-related brands (a definition that includes telecoms and online retailers), up from a third in 2006, and these have grown +16 per cent in the last year compared with +4 per cent for non-tech brands.

Nine of the Top 10 are technology-related brands, as are all seven of the newcomers to the Top 100 in 2017: XFinity, YouTube, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Salesforce, Netflix, Snapchat and Sprint.

Retail was the fastest rising category, increasing +14 per cent in value over the last 12 months, driven by ecommerce brands such as Amazon and Alibaba which, like many native internet companies, continued to add physical stores to their sales channels.

Overall the value growth of pure online retailers has increased +388 per cent since 2006, while traditional retailers dropped -23 per cent as they took longer to adapt their offering to include online.

The technology category grew +13 per cent, while fast food was this year’s third highest growing category (+7 per cent), as the leading brands introduced fresh food and value menus as well as customer touchpoints innovations that enhance the brand experience.

In terms of regions, US brands dominate the ranking, with 54 brands in the BrandZ Top 100, worth 71 per cent of the total brand value. In the last year these brands have grown +12 per cent compared with an overall -1 per cent decline for brands with origins in the rest of the world except China where overall brand growth, excluding state-owned enterprises, was +11 per cent.

The top 20 B2B brands increased their value by 11 per cent. Microsoft remains at no. 1 growing +10 per cent to $143.2bn, while Shell is the fastest B2B riser, increasing +23 per cent to $18.3bn.

The ranking also shows that as the digital world creates overlap between business and consumer environments, the border between B2B and B2C is disappearing, creating B2H (Business to Human) brands.