How Do You Stack Up Against The World’s Most Valuable Brands?
Brand Finance, the world’s leading independent brand valuation and strategy consultancy, has just released its Global 500 2015 report, an annual ranking of the world’s most powerful and most valuable brands.
This year’s rankings offered a few surprises and shakeups. While Ferrari held the top spot as the World’s Most Powerful Brand in 2014, this year’s winner is LEGO, with a Brand Strength Index Score of 93.4.
Brand Finance’s Brand Strength Index (BSI) is a 0 to 100 scale which accounts for a brand’s marketing investment, brand equity (defined as “the goodwill accumulated with customers, staff and other stakeholders”), and the overall impact of both on business performance.
LEGO’s claim to the top spot is all the more surprising given that the brand faced near bankruptcy in the early 2000’s.
So how did LEGO get a leg up on the competition? Brand Finance attributes LEGO’s success to both its broad demographic appeal and trickle-down brand awareness from the success of The Lego Movie:
“Lego’s appeal spans generations; as well as the creative freedom it gives children, the brand appeals to the nostalgia of adults. It generally avoids gendered marketing, by appealing to boys and girls equally Lego maximises the size of its target demographic. […]
However this year’s particularly strong performance is thanks to the Lego Movie. The film was both a critical and commercial success (it was the top grossing film of 2014 in the UK and Ireland), providing not just immediate revenue but also an unrivalled marketing tool. Amateur versions of the film’s stop-motion technique have proliferated online to the extent that Lego could be described as an artistic medium in its own right. Anyone attending Nathan Sawaya’s ‘Art of Brick’ exhibition at London’s Old Truman Brewery would be inclined to agree.”
Brand Finance’s 2015 Most Valuable Brand rankings, however, crowned a different winner: Apple. Expressed as a function of a brand’s BSI score, royalty rate, and forecasted revenue, the Most Valuable Brand rankings expose the international dominance of tech and telecom giants; Samsung, Google, Microsoft, and Verizon round out the top five.
At a time when some foresaw a slowdown in Apple’s growth, the commercial success of the iPhone6 and iPhone6 Plus proved such criticisms wrong, helping to set the world record for quarterly profits in the process. With the upcoming release of the anticipated Apple Watch on the horizon, Apple continues to counter its skeptics and maintain unparalleled brand value.
Want to see how you stack up against the world’s best brands? In addition to benchmarking against competitors’ marketing performance, many TrackMaven customers use our competitive intelligence platform to benchmark against aspirational brands and leaders in their sector. Who wouldn’t want to analyze and learn from the marketing strategies of best-in-class brands?
To learn how TrackMaven can help you can monitor your share of engagement and content performance relative to both competitors and the brands you admire, request a demo below!