Brand Finance: Global Brand 500

The world’s leading independent brand valuation and strategy consultancy Brand Finance just published the Global Brand 500 report. Brand Finance puts thousands of the world’s biggest brands to the Global Brand Test every year, evaluating which are the most powerful and most valuable Brands in the World. The most valuable brands in the world Below you can see the 10 most valuable brands in the world. Apple maintained its number on position even if critics complained that Apple missed the opportunity to exploit the explosive growth of the smartphone market in developing economies by the high price of the iPhone (iPhone 6 starting with 649,00 US-Dollar). Apple is followed by Samsung, which is the most valuable brand from Asia with a brand value of 81,716 billion US Dollars. The German BMW brand is the most valuable brand in Europe, but, with a value of 33,079 US Dollar it is just ranked 17.  

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The Brands with the highest Brand Value Change 2014 -2015 As you can see below, the fastest growth rates have been archived by upcoming tech brands. Twitter’s brand value has by far the most increase with 185% to 4.4 US Dollars. But, also the value of Facebook increased with 146% to over 24 billion US Dollars. The Facebook community gained 200 million new users, as a result it grew to 1,4 billion users in 2014. Especially Chinese tech brands count to the winners of the Global Brand Test in 2015. The Chinese web services company Baidu rapidly increased by 161% between 2014 and 2015. Last year it was just ranked at 264, but its current 13,3 billion US Dollar brand value puts it at rank 86. Baidu offers many services, including a Chinese language-search engine for websites, audio files, and images. It invests heavily in a range of mobile apps and location based services such as Baidu Connect which helps smaller business engage with customers more effectively. Also the Alibaba Group has a significant increase of 90% and the Alibaba Brand has a value of 11,4 billion US Dollars. By comparison, Amazon just increased 24%. But the monolithic Amazon brand is clearly more valuable with a brand value of 56 billion US Dollars. The reason for this is, among others, the multi brand strategy of the Alibaba Group. The most powerful brands in the world Below you can see the most powerful brands in the world. In order to determine the power of a brand “Brand Finance” developed the Brand Strength Index (BSI). Therefore, Brand Finance analyses the marketing investment, brand equity and finally the impact of those on business performance. Following this analysis, each brand is assigned a BSI score out of 100, which is fed into the brand value calculation. Based on the score, each brand in the league table is assigned a rating between AAA+ and D in a format similar to a credit rating. AAA+ brands are exceptionally strong and well managed while a failing brand would be assigned a D grade. Lego is the world’s most powerful brand. Lego is followed by the German leading consultancy organization PWC and the Red Bull brand of the Austrian company Red Bull GmbH. For more detailed information and other statistics please click here http://www.brandfinance.com/images/upload/brand_finance_global_500_2015.pdf