Brand owners have rarely faced a more testing period, given the need to carefully navigate rapidly shifting political and cultural conventions to reach consumers who are increasingly polarised and atomised in their tastes and views.
Marketers say there is an increased nervousness about how consumers use brands. On one side, some companies are worried about being “cancelled” by left-leaning campaigners and, on the other, being attacked for being “woke” by rightwing social media warriors emboldened by the election of Donald Trump as US president.
Choosing certain creative paths, and even using certain channels, such as Elon Musk’s X, can send a message to customers, they warn.
In a recent survey by ad agency FCB and market researcher Angus Reid Group, a majority of Canadians and Americans reported being distressed and disengaged, angered and frustrated by the rapid turns of the political dial. This directly affected their behaviour as consumers, the research found, with brands needing to cut through with “real solutions, real value and some optimism”.
Looking at this year’s Kantar Top 100 brands — an annual ranking of brand valuations — there is a clear picture of many long-standing brands retaining consumer trust, especially those that serve the particular needs of 2025.
The four highest-rated brands have not changed since last year, showing the lasting brand appeal and economic importance of dominant tech giants Apple, Google, Microsoft and Amazon. Facebook and Instagram, both owned by Meta, are ranked sixth and seventh, respectively, which alongside rivals such as TikTok shows the continued popularity of social media platforms.
Reflecting the global dominance in tech, US brands make up four-fifths of the total value of the top 100 list this year, and powered the increase of almost a third in this value to $10.7tn. Apple’s brand value of $1.3tn was 28 per cent higher than last year, making it more than a tenth of the total for the top 100.
But the fastest growing brand this year was a company increasingly being relied on to underpin the future of the tech industry: Nvidia, which has had a spectacular period of growth on the back of a chipmaking boom led by the proliferation of artificial intelligence.
Nvidia has emerged as a key provider of the advanced infrastructure needed to make AI work, leading to the company being one of the top-performing stocks on Wall Street over the past two years. This emergence into the limelight has reflected the sudden consumer realisation of the importance of not just their phones and computers but the crucial part that chips play in these devices.
Perhaps more surprisingly, given its lower profile, Nvidia’s Taiwanese rival Broadcom has also raced up the rankings, reflecting the AI-driven boom in revenues.
Both to a degree have one company to thank: ChatGPT, the widely used AI tool that launched in 2022, which is also the highest new entry in the top 100.
ChatGPT is the only pure AI company in the table this year, at number 60 with an estimated value of $43.6bn. Although it was not the first company to harness AI, its parent OpenAI was the first to take a product properly mainstream, giving it first-mover advantage for consumers.
Chinese brands continued to perform well, with consumer electronics group Xiaomi and retail platform Meituan both re-entering the Top 100 list, showing the power of the Chinese consumer and the increasing breakthrough of these brands in the west.
The sharpest fall in overall sector brand value was for alcohol companies — down 11 per cent — as drinking among younger generations has become less popular.
But brands have also been hit by the shift in fortunes among many consumers in developed western markets, where spending has been increasingly constrained by cost of living crises and uncertainty over the future of the economy.
In the US — and other countries that have been affected — consumer sentiment and worries over inflation have also been stoked by Trump’s threat of widespread tariffs in many categories.
More than half of Canadians and Americans in the FCB/Angus Reid survey said Trump’s tariffs were constraining their budgets and ability to save.
These fears are reflected in a tough year for luxury brands, with the overall category sinking slightly as sluggish consumer spending has been compounded by a drop-off in luxury demand in the key markets of the US and China.
Within this, the worst affected was Gucci — once an exemplar of the luxury category that has recently fallen out of fashion — which faced its own challenges with a steep fall in sales this year, dragging down the overall financial performance of its owner, French luxury group Kering.
Kering has moved around designers and shifted its sales channels, but “the Gucci revival is yet to appear”, according to Bernstein analyst Luca Solca.
Louis Vuitton — a bellwether for the luxury industry — also fell in brand equity, again mirrored with a decrease in sales in the first quarter of this year.
On the flip side, two of the highest climbers in the table were Costco, the budget retailer, and store owner Walmart, both benefiting from the tightened wallets of US consumers. A strong performance was also posted by Sam’s Club, a chain of membership-only warehouse club retail stores owned by Walmart.
Spanish retailer Zara, which rose five places to 65th, and Japan’s Uniqlo, which entered the Top 100 for the first time, reflected how well affordable fashion retailers were faring.
Ranking methodology
Kantar BrandZ’s valuations list the brands making the largest absolute contribution, in US dollar terms, to the total value of their parent company, considering both current and future performance.
The valuations isolate the value generated by the strength of the brand alone in the minds of consumers, with all other elements removed. To achieve this, Kantar calculated and combined two elements:
1. Financial value: the proportion of the total dollar value of the parent company that can be attributed to the brand in question, considering both current and future performance.
2. Brand contribution: quantifies the proportion of this financial value that is directly driven by a brand’s equity — its ability to deliver value to the company by predisposing consumers to choose the brand over others or pay more for it, based purely on perceptions. This does not include the proportion of consumers who choose the brand for reasons other than this predisposition, such as those attracted by price promotions or a particularly prominent display.
Brands included in the ranking must satisfy at least one of the following criteria:
• The brand is owned by an enterprise listed on a credible stock exchange, or its financial information is available in the public domain
• Unicorn brands must have their most recent valuation publicly available
