Microsoft still world’s most valuable B2B brand, but Chinese firms gaining

Other brands in the semiconductor industry also performed well, including Intel and Taiwanese TSMC. Unsurprisingly, IT brands also feature heavily in the index, especially those in the AI space: “Deep expertise in AI,” the report finds, “is now the top driver of brand consideration and preference, surpassing more traditional attributes such as delivery capability.”

After a tumultuous few months for brand investment, the report contains some good long-term news for B2B marketers: the value of the world’s top 150 B2B brands grew 8% in the last year, adding up to $250bn (a slight decline from the 10% growth rate leading to 2024).

The list also shows continued growth in value for Chinese brands, especially in finance. Chinese banks ICBC and China Construction Bank took the top two spots in their field, while in insurance, Ping An and China Life took second and third, topped only by Germany’s Allianz. While the US still dominates with 111 of the top 250 brands, Asia (66) topped Europe (57), with 32 of those Asian brands coming from China and generating 91% of their value from within China itself. Suggestions that Europe is lagging in innovation are supported by the finding that the most recently founded European brand in the index opened its doors in 1984.

What is brand value?

The report’s ranking focuses on ‘brand value,’ a metric of current earnings directly related to brand reputation. It’s based, largely, on what customers pay to use a brand via royalty agreements, as a measure of what the market actually ‘thinks’ that brand is worth.

While some might assume that this metric is more salient in the consumer world, the report’s author, Hugo Hensley, shared at an event this week that when looking at the top 500 brands of any description, 36% of total brand value comes from the B2B world.

But the portion of brand value making up overall business value is lower in B2B than in the consumer world: 18% of total value for the average top consumer company comes from its brand, compared with 13% in the B2B world.

The report also features a second metric: brand strength, a balanced weighting of brand perceptions and consumer behaviors related to that brand, based on quantitative research of consumers worldwide on how they see brands. The result is a score out of 10. Here, Microsoft was ranked third. The top spot was taken by the China Construction Bank, with hugely robust scores in its home country, followed by PayPal.

Is B2B brand still underinvested?

Tom Stein, chairman of the recently rebranded Stein (formerly Stein IAS), which is one of the organizations behind the report, tells The Drum that the gap is evidence of continued marketing underinvestment from the B2B world. “That delta equates to well more than a trillion dollars of enterprise value left on the table because the brand component is not as significant,” he says.

“Relative to B2C, B2B tends to be underinvested. You’ll find very few B2B marketers saying, ‘I have an overabundance of budget.’ I think that’s because the lines of communication with the CFO and the CEO need to be strengthened. But I think that’s happening.”

It’s happening in part, he says, because brands in the B2B world “are starting to think about making brand value a part of the KPI mix” – taking brand metrics more seriously, with increased investment, perhaps, to follow. “B2B is moving from being less visible to the world at large to highly visible. That started during Covid, when suddenly things like the supply chain became everyday conversation and life sciences became the key to sustaining life: the essentialness of B2B became much more apparent. That process is continuing now with AI; Nvidia was pretty much unknown in the world and is now known almost universally.”

Speaking of AI, Stein says that the brave new agentic world that may be dawning is one in which ensuring that B2B brand thinking isn’t siloed from sales and demand is even more important. “Brand strength is a predictor and deliverer of demand strength. Brand is future demand. As a business, you need to be cultivating future demand, then harvesting demand. You can’t just pound the bottom of the funnel. It’s not effective and it’s not efficient, especially in an agentic, zero-click world.”

Speaking at an event launching the report this week, Mimi Turner, former CMO and now head of marketplace innovation at LinkedIn, echoed this sentiment. “My heretical idea is that in B2B, brand is 10,000 times more important than it is in B2C, because in B2B, it’s the proxy for the people who use this brand, for this product that you don’t know, because maybe five years ago it didn’t exist and 10 years ago, the category didn’t exist. The stakes are higher and we’re more cautious.”