Jonathan Knowles has a background in Finance, Business Strategy, Brand Strategy and Brand Valuation. His articles have appeared in Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, The Wall Street Journal, Marketing Management, Professional Investor and Intellectual Asset Management.

Brand Valuation – 2010 Brand Finance Report

by Jonathan Knowles on March 7, 2010

I am just getting round to reviewing Brand Finance’s 2010 list of the world’s 500 most valuable brands that they published in mid February.

As always, I appreciate the extra depth that Brand Finance provides in its report versus those of Interbrand and Millward Brown – the list covers the top 500 brands (vs. 100); provides data on market value of the parent companies: and gives explicit information on the perceived riskiness of each brand (via the brand rating score).

The headline summary is as follows:

  • The brand value of the top 100 brands rose by 23% to reach $1.50 trillion, driven by a resurgence in the brand values of many financial services companies
  • You now need a brand value of over $7.9 billion to make it into Brand Finance’s top 100 brands (up from $6.2 billion last year)
  • WalMart still tops the Brand Finance list (it does not even feature in Interbrand’s top 100)
  • The next five brands are common to the Interbrand and Millward Brown lists – Google, Coca-Cola, IBM, Microsoft and GE
  • Based on Brand Finance’s data (I have yet to replicate this), the total economic value of the parent companies of the top 100 brands fell by 4% to $8.51 trillion so brand value now represents 17.6% of total economic value (up from 13.7% last year)
  • Based on the data for all 500 brands, brand value represented 15.4% of the total economic value of their parent companies (up from 14.2% last year)

As always, I find the aggregate data a very helpful reminder of the economic significance of brands.   I will report back with more observations at the sector level in a future post – as in previous years, Brand Finance seems to be believe in a highly influential role for brands in financial services.

Tagged as: Brand Valuation, Marketing Finance, Measure Value

{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }

1 Ripul November 18, 2010 at 7:37 am

Hi Jonathan,

I am a bit curious about your approach towards calculating brand value. If you can provide me some reference on this, it would be great.

Thanks,

2 Jonathan Knowles November 21, 2010 at 9:21 pm

Hi Ripul
All of the data I have reported on this blog come from Interbrand, Millward Brown or Brand Finance. None of them are particularly forthcoming about their methodology for calculating brand value – Millward Brown and Interbrand both use an “earning split” approach (where a proportion of the intangible earnings of each company are attributed to the brand), while Brand Finance uses a “royalty relief” approach (where brand value is deemed to be equivalent to the royalty payments that the company would have to make if they did not own the trademark). Their respective websites may give a bit more detail.
Best
Jonathan

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