Your brand equity is simply the value of your brand in the minds of all potential consumers, added up, which they use to help themselves make purchase decisions. Have a high brand value for someone? They trust you and will pay more than the market average for a product, and less if they think you don’t.
This is why brands invest so much money into building equity – you can charge a premium once you’ve got it.
Let’s look into who has brand equity, where it’s done best. We’ll look at the how another day.
Who
There are several lists online about who has the greatest amount of brand equity, but I’m partial to the list done by Brand Finance. Their list has the top 500, and doesn’t overly represent Western countries. You can find it here – Brand Finance Top 500 2020.
I’ll list the top 10 here.
Rank | Company | Country | Category |
1 | Amazon | United States | Retail |
2 | United States | Tech | |
3 | Apple | United States | Tech |
4 | Microsoft | United States | Tech |
5 | Samsung | South Korea | Tech |
6 | ICBC | China | Banking |
7 | United States | Media | |
8 | Walmart | United States | Retail |
9 | Ping An | China | Insurance |
I would guess 8 out of 10 of those are known to everyone, but you can’t count any strong brands from China, as they have up to 1 billion eyes on them.
I’ve counted up by sector as well – here are the top 5:
Rank | Category | Count |
1 | Banking | 66 |
2 | Tech | 46 |
3 | Retail | 43 |
4 | Telecoms | 36 |
5 | Insurance | 29 |
You can see all of my data here: Data Analysis
Where
Not every excels at brand equity. Some countries do best at manufacture, some at marketing. I wanted to know what countries are doing best per capita, so I ran that data. I’ve basically calculated total brands by country, divided by 10,000, and then normalized all of the scores for any country with over a million population.
Before running the data I would have expected Sweden brand equity to be the highest. The small country has several well-known brands. They aren’t number 1, but did make the list:
Rank | Country | Brands | Population | Per Capita | Normalized Score |
1 | Switzerland | 10 | 8,591,365 | 11.6 | 10.0 |
2 | United States | 203 | 329,064,917 | 6.2 | 5.3 |
3 | Singapore | 3 | 5,804,337 | 5.2 | 4.4 |
4 | France | 32 | 65,129,728 | 4.9 | 4.2 |
5 | Canada | 17 | 37,411,047 | 4.5 | 3.9 |
6 | Hong Kong | 3 | 7,436,154 | 4.0 | 3.4 |
7 | Sweden | 4 | 10,036,379 | 4.0 | 3.4 |
8 | Norway | 2 | 5,378,857 | 3.7 | 3.2 |
9 | Qatar | 1 | 2,832,067 | 3.5 | 3.0 |
10 | United Arab Emirates | 3 | 9,770,529 | 3.1 | 2.6 |
Switzerland has 10 brands in the top 500, putting them at top of the brand equity per capita list. This shouldn’t be surprising with Nestle, Role, Nescafe all being globally recognized.
Canada is clearly doing well, at number 5, and 17 brands up there.