Each year, Brand Finance, a leading valuation and strategy consultancy, values the brands of the world’s largest companies—assessing factors like marketing investment, familiarity, preference, sustainability and margins—to determine what proportion of their revenue is contributed by the brand. Some results from the 2017 rankings of the Brand Finance U.S. 500:
- Illinois’ most valuable brand, McDonald’s, lost nine percent of its value as healthy eating and fast-casual trends ate into its market share. The brand values of KFC, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, Subway and Domino’s also fell due to heavy competition in an increasingly fragmented market.
- Thirty-one of America’s most valuable brands called Illinois home, including industry leaders like Accenture and Boeing. Their combined brand value was $167.9 billion, or 5.4 percent of the total value of the U.S. 500, making Illinois the fifth-most valuable state in brand value.
- United Airlines was Illinois’ standout winner in 2016, with brand value growth of 60 percent to $7.2 billion, while the airline sector as a whole had a great year. (This was before the forced removal of a passenger on United Flight 3411 on April 9, 2017 caused a national uproar—and the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars in United’s market value.)
- California remained the most valuable U.S. state by brand value, dominating the tech sector—the most valuable and fastest-growing sector in terms of brand value. Seventy-one of the top 500 U.S. brands hail from the Golden State, with a value of $725 billion, or 23 percent of the national total. New York, Texas and Washington were next on the list of states ranked by brand value.
- Apple was overtaken as America’s (and the world’s) most valuable brand by Google, which last held the title in 2011. Apple’s brand value of $107 billion declined 27 percent last year as it focused on tweaking existing products rather than delivering genuine innovation. Valued at $109 billion, Google is again the world’s most valuable brand.
- Amazon’s brand value grew by 53 percent as it continued to reshape the retail market. By next year, the company could easily become the world’s most valuable brand.
- The total value of America’s top 500 brands is now $3.14 trillion, up 11 percent from 2016. iBi
View the complete Brand Finance U.S. 500 at brandirectory.com.
