Coca-Cola, the 130-year-old soft drink brand has been a mainstay of the global top 10 by brand value since the BrandZ report was launched in 2006 and it was placed third after Microsoft and GE.
But it was soon overtaken by the likes of Google and by last year, had slid down to eighth position, albeit its brand value continued to grow year by year.
Millward Brown’s BrandZ valuation process takes the financial value created by a brand in US dollars and multiplies it by the proportion of that value generated by the brand contribution alone. 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.
This year, the value of the Coca-Cola brand fell for the first time in the survey’s history, by four percent to $80.3bn, amid growing public awareness of the risks to health from the sugar content of soft drinks and despite respectable growth in the Coca-Cola Company’s share price.
It has sunk to 13th place in the 2016 rankings, which, in an irony which Coca-Cola executives will not appreciate, is one below tobacco brand Marlboro.
Other brands which have climbed above Coke in the past year include Facebook, Amazon, McDonald’s and Chinese tech company, Tencent.
The company appears to have already taken action which could help the brand regroup. In January this year, it ditched the different brand personalities for Coca-Cola Life, Coca-Cola Zero and Diet/Light Coke and unleashed a global campaign in which the brands were marketed as Coca-Cola variants.
The brands above Coca-Cola now are Google: $229.2bn which is up by 32 percent, Apple: $228.5bn which is down by eight percent, Microsoft: $121.8bn which is up by five percent, Facebook: $102.6bn, which is up by 44 percent, Amazon: $99bn which is up by 59 percent and Marlboro: $84.1bn which is up by five percent.
