Perhaps recognizing that ”the world’s most valuable brands” theme is becoming over-worked, CoreBrand released a brand league table this week with a twist: their league table contains only corporate brands, and ranks them according to the percentage of market capitalization represented by the corporate brand, not by actual value.
It is a potentially interesting approach. Leaving aside the methodological challenges inherent in separating out the value of Coca-Cola the corporate brand from Coca-Cola the product brand (the majority of the companies on the list are monobrands – meaning that the product brand and the corporate brand are the same), it would be fascinating to see some data on the extent to which branding at the corporate level is adding value above and beyond what is being done at the product level. And whether the scale of this contribution varies by industry.
Unfortunately CoreBrand list consists of nothing more than the ordinal ranking of 100 corporate brands on two bases:
- By the percentage of market capitalization represented by the corporate brand
- By the dollar value of the corporate brand
There is no data on either the actual dollar value of the corporate brands or on the actual percentage of market capitalization that the value of the corporate brand represents. Readers are left to guess whether corporate brand value is 3% or 30% of overall market capitalization.
It is a missed opportunity to add meaningfully to the debate about brand valuation. This is a shame since the CoreBrand list is based on two interesting premises:
- First, that corporate brands matter
- Second, that it is not so much the absolute value of brands that matters as the proportion that they contribute to overall corporate value
I, for one, would have loved to see some data on the relative importance of corporate brands. Or some data on how this varies by industry (it is self evident that product brands matter more in certain industries than others – but is this true at the corporate brand level?)
Instead, I am left to scan the list for interesting snippets, such as:
- Is the Hershey corporate brand (ranked #1) really adding proportionately more value than the Home Depot corporate brand (ranked #39)?
- Is the Yahoo corporate brand (ranked #40) really working that much harder than the Google corporate brand (ranked #88)?
- And are those corporate communicators at P&G (ranked #54) really contributing proportionately less than their counterparts at Colgate-Palmolive, Estee Lauder and Avon (ranked at #6, #19 and #43 respectively)?
I suspect that most readers will fail to realize that this is a ranking of corporate brand contribution to overall value, not overall brand value. Any list that includes Hershey, Coca-Cola, Harley, Campbells and Kelloggs as its top 5 can easily be mistaken for just another brand valuation league table.
