They have completely dissimilar businesses, but Ferrari (RACE 0.64%), Netflix (NFLX -6.59%), and salesforce.com (CRM 0.05%) share one thing in common: They all broke into the top 100 global brands this year.
Brand consultancy Interbrand released its 18th annual survey of the most valuable brands in the world, looking at how brands sway customers and drive economic value for their owners.
For Netflix and Salesforce, it's the first time they've appeared on the list; Ferrari re-enters after a three-year hiatus, having last appeared in 2013. Let's take a look at how they rank and what the value is of these brands.
Image source: Ferrari.
Ferrari: Rank No. 88
Brand value: $4.876 billion
Luxury carmaker Ferrari has seen its fortunes rise again as sales of its V12 engine car soared while V8 engine cars stalled. Shipments of V12s surged 40% in the first half of 2017, while V8s were down slightly. Whether it can continue to motor ahead when the auto industry is expected to decline remains to be seen.
Carmakers did get a boost in September as people in hurricane-ravaged states scrambled to replace vehicles damaged by the storms. Sales for the month were the highest since July 2015 and pushed the seasonally adjusted annual sales rate for all U.S. light vehicles to 18.57 million units. That was significantly above the 16.14 million from August. But very few were probably luxury car owners who were replacing their Ferraris.
Ferrari re-enters the Interbrand top 100 list at No. 88, with a brand value of almost $4.9 billion, a 22% gain over the $4 billion value its brand held the last time it appeared. While that's good enough to put it ahead of No. 98 Tesla, it lags well behind other automotive brands such as Land Rover, Porsche, and the top auto brand, Toyota, which ranks seventh on the list and has a brand value of $50.3 billion.
Image source: Getty Images.
Salesforce: Rank No. 84
Brand value: $5.224 billion
Salesforce is the largest provider of cloud-based CRM [customer relationship management] services in the world. Data analytics is evolving from even just a few short years ago, but making sense of big data has become essential for firms that are generating billions of data points every minute. Analytics shops like Salesforce ease a client's ability to access the data and make actionable decisions based upon it.
Compared to analytics giants like SAP and Oracle, which also ranked highly on the Interbrand global brands list (No. 21 and No. 17, respectively), Salesforce is a distant runner-up at 84. Yet in its specialized field, it is the dominant player with IDC saying it owned 18.1% of the market last year while its closest rivals, Oracle and SAP, controlled just 9.4% and 7.2%, respectively.
That suggests we could see Salesforce not only reappearing on the top global brands list for years to come, but making a run at its bigger brethren, too.
Image source: Getty Images.
Netflix: Rank No. 78
Brand value: $5.592 billion
It's hard to believe that this is the first year Netflix has made the Interbrand list considering the dominance it has exhibited over the years, first in movie rentals, then in streaming. However, it could be that because it is now a content creator and is threatening to overturn the entrenched Hollywood movie distribution model, its role and value has grown enormously.
Interbrand identified Netflix's leadership in "tapping into the natural curiosity of their audiences to discover new content" and providing hyper-personalized content. It goes on to note the streaming service had over 93 million members last year in 190 countries; it now has over 100 million subscribers. It also points to Netflix's signing a licensing deal with iQiyi, a subsidiary of Chinese streaming service Baidu, that will allow selected content to get distributed in the strictly controlled market.
With a brand value of almost $5.6 billion, Netflix's 78th-place showing places it ahead of Discovery Communications, which lost eight spots as its brand value declined 9% to $5.4 billion.
Netflix still has a ways to go before it catches up to leader Disney at No. 14 with a brand value of $40.8 billion, but as it builds up its library of content that covers a broad swath of interests and age groups, it may yet be able to challenge this rival.
