Box Opened, Tentacles Appear, Everybody’s Entertained

Michael Hedges May 22, 2014 Follow on Twitter

Brand building is an engaging business. The media world is in that business, for itself and for others. The biggest brands get people talking which, in post-modern terms, has nothing to do with actually talking. Social media has usurped than function. This is fun when the brand message is fun, happiness or shopping, less so for oil spills and bank scandals.

The brands everybody knows have become even more valuable, reports the Millward Brown Brandz Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands list, adding 12% value altogether in the last year. Technology brands, once again, dominate the top of the list. More than two-thirds (71%) have been on this top 100 list since 2008.

Google rose to the top spot, knocking off Apple, which had been number one for the last three years. The market research company, part of WPP; estimated Google’s brand value at US$ 158 billion, up 40% year on year. Apple’s brand value dropped 20% to US$ 148 billion, good enough for number two in the world.

Disappearing global financial worries sent the aggregate value of the top 100 brands up 12% to US$ 2.9 trillion. Since the 2008 Great Recession the top 100 brands increased value about 6% per year on average. Value, the report indicates, has grown fastest among internet-driven brands, largely but not exclusively big US names.

The brand most closely related to the media sector making the list was film and TV producer Disney, rising 44% in value to 23rd place, the only top 100 brand in the report’s entertainment category. Virtually all global brands growing in value – from telecoms to apparel and automobiles – have some attachment to the media sector. “Leadership in offering mid-market cars with entertainment and navigation technology provided a competitive, brand-defining advantage” to automaker Ford, new to the list this year at number 84, said the Millward Brown report.

New media brands in the technology category struck the pose. Twitter and LinkedIn entered the top 100 at 71st and 78th, respectively. Brand value for Chinese social network Tencent rose 97% one year on, and Facebook’s brand value rose 68%. British telecom BT, heavily invested in IPTV offerings, had the third biggest growth spurt, 61% year on year. Mobile telecom Movistar, owned by Spain’s Telefonica and covering Spain and most of Latin America, is also an IPTV provider, increasing its brand value 56%. Telecom giant AT&T ranked 8th in brand value globally announced this week it would acquire satellite TV provider DirecTV for US$48.5 billion.

Consumer and retail brands are, of course, big advertisers the world over. McDonalds, Coca-Cola and Amazon made the top ten. Credit card payment systems Visa and MasterCard ranked 7th and 18th, respectively, in brand value.  Sportswear brands Nike and Adidas were fast movers up the brand value list as was home goods retailer Ikea and Japanese casual wear retailer Uniqlo.

Along with the 2014 Brandz hot-list, Millward Brown also released a detailed analysis of “tens of millions of Twitter conversations” about brands called Verve, which also provides a ranking, less Chinese brands for language reasons. Twitter, Google, Starbucks, Facebook and Disney comprise the top five. At the bottom: oil companies and banks.

An “explosion of (marketing) channel fragmentation,” the Millward Brown researchers and analysts offered, has come from new media. “Pandora’s Box has been opened. The pace and consistency of digital media’s growth is strong enough that it will surpass television as the number one media channel by 2018, but it’s possible consumer consumption patterns have never been so far ahead of a marketer’s ability to productively address them.”

As a smart person once said, research shows research sells.

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