What are the best brand strategy examples to learn from?   

Here's a great place to start.

There's a set of ‘superbrands’ that top the charts.  

34 of them in total.

Read on to find out who they are, with examples that highlight what to focus on when creating brand strategies for your clients or business. 

What are the best brands to study? 

There are three global brand valuation studies (Kantar's BRANDZ, Brand Finance and Interbrand) that identify the world's most valuable brands, producing a top 100 list every year. (Brand Finance do a top 500).

They use different approaches to assess brand value, but some brands successfully appear on every one of these lists. 

There are 34 in total - and while they are very different businesses, when it comes to brand strategy, they have some things in common. 

There are common questions they answer to define what their brands are all...

3 is the magic number, or so sang De La Soul. (Anyone else remember that one??)).

Douglas Adams would have you believe it’s 42.

But my magic number is 35. 

35 is the number of brands that appear across all 3 global brand valuation studies (BRANDZ, Interbrand and Brand Finance).  I’ve been researching the brand strategies of the brands that appear in these studies since 2013. (Yes – I’m a total brand strategy geek, and proud of it).  But it’s the ones that appear across all that I do a really deep dive on every year.  And this year there are 35 of them.

Strong brands build the bottom line

Now, I hear some of you scoffing.  Because it’s easy to take pot shots at these valuation studies, as the inimitable Mark Ritson does here. The figures for the same brand are often widely different.  Take Google – who BRANDZ value at $323,601m and Brand Finance have at $159,722m.  Just a teeny $163,879m difference. A mere...