Coca-Cola recovers top 10 global brand status
Increased marketing spend and innovation have helped the Coca-Cola brand return to the top 10 in Kantar’s most valuable brands list for the first time in 8 years.
By Molly Innes
Coca-Cola has been named one of the ten most valuable brands in the world for the first time in eight years, according to Kantar’s latest BrandZ rankings.
Coca-Cola, including its Diet Coke and Coke Zero variants, is one of just 16 brands to grow in value this year, coming in at 10th, up from 17th in 2022, according to the annual brand valuation report.
The brand’s value increased by 8% in the last year, from $97.8bn to $106.1bn today.
Value of world’s biggest brands drops by 20%Kantar classes Coca-Cola as a premium brand with strong pricing power. The Coca-Cola Company has been investing heavily in its core brand, variants and the rest of its portfolio in the last 18 months to try and mitigate price increases. Last year, it upped its marketing spend to help it “earn” higher prices.
At the end of 2022, CFO John Murphy said the business was increasing its investment in consumer-facing marketing across its portfolio again to “get a fast start” in 2023.
It seems the brand is happy with the results of this, as it recently described how “consumer-centric segmentation” has been key to helping it mitigate the difficulties of the challenging macroeconomic environment.
Recognising the role of increased prices as a strategy to fight inflation, CEO James Quincey also detailed in April this year that its ability to stay close to consumers is helping it grow.
At the same time, the overall company – not just the Coca-Cola brands – posted a net revenue growth of 5% year-on-year to $11bn in the first quarter.
Coca-Cola is an “incredibly different” brand, says Adele Jolliffe, an executive in Kantar’s Insights team. “In consumers’ eyes, even though there are other cola brands available, it maintains that sense of distinction”, she adds.
Jolliffe says that Coca-Cola “continues to set the standard in the category” for innovation. Kantar cites its recent partnership with Jack Daniels on a Coca-Cola RTD product as an example of its innovation excellence.
Innovating and expanding into different segments makes Coca-Cola a “good example of a brand that isn’t just resting on its laurels,” adds Ellie Thorpe, BrandZ lead at Kantar.
Methodology
Kantar’s BrandZ valuation process takes the financial value created by a brand in US dollars and multiplies it by brand contribution. The result is Brand Value – the dollar amount a brand contributes to the overall value of a corporation. Isolating and measuring this intangible asset reveals an additional source of shareholder value that otherwise would not exist.
That brand contribution is derived from consumer research that quantifies how much of the volume people purchase and how much of the price premium people pay can be attributed to brand equity, connecting what people think to what they do.
This year’s analysis involves 4.2 million consumer interviews covering 21,000 brands across 540 categories in 54 markets.
