Technology
Chart: Ranking the World’s Most Valuable Brands
Chart: Ranking the World’s Most Valuable Brands
In just 10 years, tech brands have taken over the list
The Chart of the Week is a weekly Visual Capitalist feature on Fridays.
Tech has already conquered the stock market and the realm of digital advertising.
Now the technology sector also has a strangle hold on another measure: the value of consumer brands.
Global Rank | Brand | Brand Value 2017 |
---|---|---|
#1 | $245.6 billion | |
#2 | Apple | $234.7 billion |
#3 | Microsoft | $143.2 billion |
#4 | Amazon | $139.3 billion |
#5 | $129.8 billion |
The massive scale and reach of tech companies has helped their brand values to skyrocket over the last decade. In fact, even just adding Google and Apple’s most recent numbers together gives a figure that rivals the GDP of Sweden.
What is Brand Value, Anyways?
This data on the most valuable brands comes from the BrandZ Top 100 Global Brands report for 2017, which uses a specific methodology to quantify the financial worth of different brands around the world.
In this case, by “brand”, we are referring to the intangible asset that exists in the minds of consumers, which is usually an image forged over time through exposure to branding, ads, publicity, and other types of personal experiences.
Meanwhile, the “brand value” is the dollar amount a brand contributes to the overall value of a corporation. Measuring this intangible asset reveals an additional source of shareholder value that otherwise would not exist.
Diving Deeper
What types of companies are building the strongest brands?
Here is the Top 100 list broken down by a few different key categories.
Note: in these rankings we are counting both Amazon and Alibaba as tech companies
The amount of Chinese brands making the Top 100 is rising quickly – in 2008, only four made the list.
Today, there are 12 Chinese brands on the list, including widely-known names such as Huawei, Alibaba, and Ping An Insurance.
Other types of brands that do well in the rankings include financial services (23 of 100 brands) and technology (23 of 100 brands).
Brand Value on the Rise
Overall, the cumulative brand value of all 100 companies on the list has been rising. It now sits at $3.6 trillion in total.
For comparison’s sake – that’s bigger than the annual GDP of Germany, the world’s fourth largest economy.
Brands
How Tech Logos Have Evolved Over Time
From complete overhauls to more subtle tweaks, these tech logos have had quite a journey. Featuring: Google, Apple, and more.
How Tech Logos Have Evolved Over Time
This was originally posted on our Voronoi app. Download the app for free on iOS or Android and discover incredible data-driven charts from a variety of trusted sources.
One would be hard-pressed to find a company that has never changed its logo. Granted, some brands—like Rolex, IBM, and Coca-Cola—tend to just have more minimalistic updates. But other companies undergo an entire identity change, thus necessitating a full overhaul.
In this graphic, we visualized the evolution of prominent tech companies’ logos over time. All of these brands ranked highly in a Q1 2024 YouGov study of America’s most famous tech brands. The logo changes are sourced from 1000logos.net.
How Many Times Has Google Changed Its Logo?
Google and Facebook share a 98% fame rating according to YouGov. But while Facebook’s rise was captured in The Social Network (2010), Google’s history tends to be a little less lionized in popular culture.
For example, Google was initially called “Backrub” because it analyzed “back links” to understand how important a website was. Since its founding, Google has undergone eight logo changes, finally settling on its current one in 2015.
Company | Number of Logo Changes |
---|---|
8 | |
HP | 8 |
Amazon | 6 |
Microsoft | 6 |
Samsung | 6 |
Apple | 5* |
Note: *Includes color changes. Source: 1000Logos.net
Another fun origin story is Microsoft, which started off as Traf-O-Data, a traffic counter reading company that generated reports for traffic engineers. By 1975, the company was renamed. But it wasn’t until 2012 that Microsoft put the iconic Windows logo—still the most popular desktop operating system—alongside its name.
And then there’s Samsung, which started as a grocery trading store in 1938. Its pivot to electronics started in the 1970s with black and white television sets. For 55 years, the company kept some form of stars from its first logo, until 1993, when the iconic encircled blue Samsung logo debuted.
Finally, Apple’s first logo in 1976 featured Isaac Newton reading under a tree—moments before an apple fell on his head. Two years later, the iconic bitten apple logo would be designed at Steve Jobs’ behest, and it would take another two decades for it to go monochrome.
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