Cisco and Huawei inch up the Interbrand top 100

Brand consultancy Interbrand has published its latest ranking of the world’s strongest brands and given Cisco and Huawei minor promotions.

In last year’s assessment Cisco had the 16th most valuable brand, while Huawei came in at number 70. In the intervening 12 months Cisco’s brand value has increased by 8% to $34.5 billion, taking it to 15th place ahead of a waning GE. Meanwhile Huawei’s brand has apparently become 14% more valuable and now contributes $7.5 billion to its success.

Huawei was so happy about this that it issued a press release. “In the next industry cycle, technologies like AI, 5G, IoT, and cloud computing will become more and more important,” said Zhang Hongxi, Huawei’s Corporate Marketing President. “Huawei delivers more value and creates a better experience for customers by integrating AI, smart devices, networks, and the cloud.” Cisco didn’t bother.

Measuring brand value must be a tricky business since brand an inherently emotive, instinctive concept. A summary of Interbrand’s methodology can be seen below. It combines financial data, which is easy to measure, with an index that claims to measure the portion of purchasing decisions attributable directly to brand and another that attempts to quantify brand loyalty.

In essence it seems to get the raw financial data and then tweak them up or down according to how Interbrand perceives the value of the respective brands. The resulting ranking seems to correlate much more closely with market value than it does revenues or even profitability, which stands to reason since share price is heavily influenced by investor belief in the company’s ongoing performance and growth.

Once more there’s no sign of Nokia or Ericsson on the list, which makes you wonder how much of Huawei’s brand value is derived from its consumer devices business. Apple has been at the top of the list since it launched the iPhone and Google is consistently second. Amazon’s brand value has apparently increased by 56% since last year, allowing it to overtake Microsoft and Coca Cola for third place. There are no operator brands in the top 100 despite Verizon and AT&T making vast profits.