Value of top 100 B2B brands up 10% versus last year, study finds

The top 100 most valuable B2B brands are collectively worth a quarter of a trillion US dollars (£198bn) more in 2024 compared to last year, according to new figures from Brand Finance. This represents a 10% increase versus this time in 2023. The data comes as more B2B brands invest in brand-building work, after a traditional overreliance on performance advertising. In their Marketing Week column last month, Peter Weinberg and Jon Lombardo, formerly of the LinkedIn B2B Institute, suggested B2B brands are finally waking up to the importance of brand. It’s something they describe as ‘the Flippening’, “the magical moment when B2B businesses realise that brand marketing creates much more financial value than so-called ‘performance marketing’”.

With the collective value of the world’s biggest B2B brands having grown rapidly in the last year, it appears that B2B businesses are reaping the rewards of investing in brand-building. Brand Finance uses the ‘royalty relief’ method to calculate its ranking of brand value. The method determines the value a company would be willing to pay to license its brand if it did not own it. This involves estimating the future revenue attributable to a brand and calculating a royalty rate that would be charged for the use of the brand. Most brands are not licensed, making this scenario purely hypothetical. Therefore, to work out the brand value of those on the list, Brand Finance looks at brand health measures to determine brand strength and uses sector-specific data to determine the royalty rate range there, as well as looking at parent company data to work out the revenue attributable to each brand. It uses all these factors to arrive at the values on its list.