Technology giants Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook take the top 5 places in the 2017 BrandZ top 100 most valuable global brands ranking released by WPP and Kantar Millward Brown.
Google, Apple and Microsoft retain the top three positions, growing their brand value +7% to US$245.6bn, +3% to US$234.7bn and +18% to US$143.2bn respectively over the past year.
Amazon achieved the highest dollar value growth of all brands in the top 100 ranking, increasing by US$40.3bn (+41%) to US$139.3bn to take the no. 4 position. The retail giant has continued to focus on its technology ecosystem honed to meet multiple consumer needs such as online shopping, rapid delivery and entertainment, as well as introducing new artificial intelligence-enabled services including grocery delivery and personal assistant Alexa.
Meanwhile Facebook, at no. 5, grew +27% to US$129.8bn.
25% of the total value of the 100 most valuable global brands is made up of the combined brand value of the tech’s ‘Fearsome Five’, emphasising their dominant positions in the modern business landscape.
Top 10 most valuable global brands 2017
David Roth, CEO EMEA and Asia of The Store WPP said, “Dubbed the ‘The Frightful Five’ by some, the tech giants that head the rankings are more like the ‘Fearsome Five’ to their competitors, given their huge brand power and a seemingly unassailable market position.”
Doreen Wang, Kantar Millward Brown’s global head of BrandZ said, “This is the era of internet giants that have developed ever-growing ecosystems that touch and connect consumers, with the overall aim of making life easier, simpler and better. Technology with the consumer at its centre has redefined our expectations, and we now take for granted that products, services, tools and content are immediately available at our fingertips.”
See the full list here.
This year, 24 brands from the APAC region made it into the top 100 – mostly concentrated around China. The 13 Chinese brands are: Tencent (8), Alibaba (14), China Mobile (17), ICBC (28), Baidu (39), Huawei (49), China Construction Bank (54), Ping An (61), Moutai (64), Agricultural Bank of China (72), China Life (78), Sinopec (85) and Bank of China (94).
The rest of APAC contributed 11 more: Commonwealth Bank of Australia, ANZ and Telstra (Australia), Nissan, Toyota, Honda, Softbank and NTT (Japan), Samsung (Korea), AIA (HK) and HDFC (India).
Tencent (no.8), which saw increased use of its social platform WeChat and entered the top 10 for the first time, with a brand value increase of +27% to US$108.3bn.
Retail was the fastest rising category, increasing +14% in value over the last 12 months, driven by e-commerce 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% since 2006, while traditional retailers dropped -23% as they took longer to adapt their offering to include online.
The list is now in its 12th year. It combines measures of brand equity based on interviews with more than 3 million consumers about thousands of brands, with analysis of each company’s business and financial performance, using data from both Bloomberg and Kantar Worldpanel.
