Despite what experts might claim, putting a dollar value on any company’s brand is an inexact science.
Nevertheless because brands are so hugely valuable and commercially important, once a year a major branding consultancy called Brand Finance ranks the top 500 USA companies in order of their brand value.
At the very top of the list, not surprisingly, come the tech giants. Google has ranked number one for 2017 with a brand value of US$109.5 billion (A$146 billion). In order, numbers two to 10 were Apple, Amazon, AT&T, Microsoft, Verizon, Walmart, Facebook, Wells Fargo and McDonalds.
These rankings are for USA based companies only.
The rankings go all the way down to 500, so you would think that Trek and Specialized at the very least, would make the cut, but neither are anywhere to be seen.
It’s a sobering reminder of exactly where bicycles sit in the mindsets of the USA general public and the worlds of business and marketing.
In terms of sporting goods more generally, Nike was the highest, ranked 17. Other sporting goods brands to make the cut were Under Armour, The North Face, Dicks Sporting Goods, Skechers, Foot Locker, Timberland and Converse.
Interestingly, automobile brands do not rank as highly as you might imagine with Ford first at 25 and Chevrolet at 60 being the only two brands in the top 100.
By contrast, in the admittedly much smaller market of Taiwan, both Giant and Merida have consistently ranked amongst their top 10 international brands, once again behind a number of tech companies lead by Asus.
If you’d like to see the USA report in detail including the methodology behind how each brand was valued and ranked, then follow this link.
