Study: Tech firms take top 5 'most valuable brands' spots

Dive Brief:

WPP and Kantar Millward Brown release the 2017 BrandZ Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands report today and a press release made available to Marketing Dive in advance pinpoints the “fearsome five” tech companies dominating the list's top spots: Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook. Although, for the purposes of the report, Amazon is categorized as a retail company.
The total brand value of the top 100 increased 8% to $3.64 trillion, and this year’s top 10 are worth almost as much as the entire top 100 in 2006. Amazon was the brand with the highest dollar growth in the top 100 this year with a 41% lift of $40.3 billion to hit a total value of $139.3 billion.
Even though technology rules the first five spots, retail was the fastest growing category with a 14% increase in value over the last year although technology contributed to that growth through e-commerce brands such as Amazon and Alibaba.

Dive Insight:

Google, Apple and Microsoft retained their top three spots from last year, and as an indication of the dominance of the top five brands those companies combined represent 25% of the total value of the top 100. The rankings are based on interviews with more than 3 million consumers worldwide as well as analysis of financial and business performance.

Amazon is an interesting case for reports like this because it can be hard to categories companies and digital's influence grows. Although Amazon is often referred to as an “e-commerce giant,” in fact it has become much more a technology company with its Amazon Web Services cloud storage a major player in that marketplace as just one example. The press release on the top 100 list acknowledged Amazon’s growth can be attributed to its continued focus on technology, including artificial intelligence.

The press release highlighted other examples of traditional non-tech brands adopting technology to innovate and increase brand appeal such as Adidas, the fastest rising brand by percentage growth at 58%, which introduced 3D printing to produce footwear, and Domino’s Pizza, which has a real-time order tracker.

Newcomers to this year’s 100 most valuable brands list include Xfinity, YouTube, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Salesforce, Netflix, Snapchat and Sprint.