Image: Jason RalstonApple has been ranked number one for Best Global brand, but can you guess which is the fastest growing?
The Apple brand is now worth $178,119 million, suggests the latest Best Brands global rankings from Interbrand. That represents a growth rate of five per cent.
It is followed by Google, then Coca Cola, Microsoft, Toyota, IBM, Samsung and Amazon.
But maybe the tables showing the brands that have seen their value grow the most, is more interesting.
Facebook tops this chart – up 33%, to a value of $32,593 million. The Facebook brand value maybe the fastest growing, but it sits at a lowly 15th spot in the list of most valuable brands.
Second fastest growing brand was Amazon, up 25%. But you may be surprised by the identity of some of the other rapidly growing brand values.
Number three was Lego – up 22%, maybe this is a result of it entering the movie business, – and now the company has got a Lego Batman movie planned for 2017.
Number four for fastest growth was Nissan, followed by Adobe, Starbucks, Zara, MINI, Porsche, and Mercedes Benz.
In fact, while the techs dominate the list of the most valuable brands with ten companies sitting in the top 20, the car makers seem to have done better for growth – Facebook and Amazon aside.
Of the top 29 fastest growing brand values, ten were car companies, six techs – depending on how you define tech.
Mind you, it is quite hard to define techs, these days. Is PayPal, whose brand value rose by 14%, a tech or a financial company? Is Amazon a tech? Is Hermes, up 17 per cent an online retailer or a tech?
For that matter, car companies are becoming more like techs, especially as we move towards autonomous cars.
Maybe it would be more accurate to say that of the leading 16 brands by value only Coca-Cola, McDonald’s and Disney are not techs. But then even McDonalds has implemented high tech customer purchase systems, and Disney has used tech to stay on the top of its field. Sugary brown drinks, however, feel pretty-old school, although no doubt management structure and marketing applies the ideas of digital transformation.
Paola Norambuena, from Interbrand said: "Where once clear definitions between traditional sectors provided competitive guides and measures, the more that brands create or invest in seamless mecosystems—experiences built entirely around customers—the less clear those lines become. This is especially true in the blur between experiences such as clicks and mortar or sectors like automotive and technology. In fact, there’s barely a sector that’s not impacted by technology, while the technology sector itself (one the of the largest and growing sectors represented on the Best Global Brands report) tends to defy definition from one brand to the next."
And "We’ve seen how technology has paved the way for innovation. Brands across all industries are harnessing its power to create unprecedented personal experiences—zeroed in on the customer."
