Member Article

Battle of the brands: Jamie on Disney power and Apple value

Every year, brand valuation and strategy consultancy Brand Finance grabs the attention of many a marketing and branding professional when it reveals its rank of the world’s top 500 global brands.

However, we must be careful not to confuse what the agency is referring to when it talks about brand power and brand value.

Brand Power

The firm evaluates which brands are the ‘most powerful’, based on factors such as familiarity, loyalty, promotion, marketing investment, staff satisfaction and corporate reputation.

This year, Brand Finance named Disney as the world’s most powerful brand and as you’d imagine, the internet has since been filled with countless articles praising our animated overlords!

With its acquisition of the box-office-breaking Star Wars franchise, Disney has this year deposed Lego at the top of the list following the Danish company’s image being adversely affected by a series of well-documented controversies.

However, it’s Brand Finance’s ranking of the world’s most valuable brands which may be of most interest to readers. Whilst ranking ‘brand power’ considers important factors, many business readers will always consider value to be a chief indicator when ranking brands.

Brand Value

In terms of brand value, Apple comes out on top.

Brand value is up 14%, thanks to the huge success of the iPhone 6 and recently released iPhone 6s. Revenue for Q4 of the fiscal year 2015 was a record-breaking $51.5bn, with profits at $11.1bn while revenues for the year were $233.7bn.

This huge surge is partly responsible forrecent disappointing sales growth, the slowest since the iPhone was launched in 2007. However with 74.8 million handsets sold in the last quarter in a saturated market, assertions that Apple has gone rotten are premature.

Apple Pay is beginning to generate traction, potentially heralding the brand’s long-anticipated expansion into the broader arena of financial services, to say nothing of its rumoured foray into the auto industry.

The Difference

As previously alluded to, brand power - which is only the initial part of Brand Finance’s analysis - takes a range of noteworthy factors (see above) into account when evaluating the strength of a brand. However, it would be unwise to hold this indicator in greater esteem than brand value, which harnesses greater quantitative data to reach its conclusion.

Certainly, from a business perspective, readers will always hold revenue and profit more highly than staff satisfaction and corporate reputation.

Of course, that’s not to take away anything from Brand Finance’s interesting investigation or to overlook Disney’s prominence here. In fact, it is quite remarkable to see the success its Star Wars acquisition has generated in particular.

Brand Finance estimated the value of the Star Wars brand to be $10bn, indeed this dwarves (Yes, we are still talking about Star Wars and not The Lord of the Rings…) the $4bn it paid for Lucasfilm in 2012!

Yet, when you stumble across headlines such as ‘Disney: the world’s strongest brand’ - as the internet reacts to the findings of the ranking - beware to take the language used with a pinch of salt!