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Coca-Cola has retained its position as the world’s highest value soft drinks brand, with a total value of $70bn and year-on-year value of growth of 3%, according to research from brand agency Millward Brown.
In fact, the top six brands – with Red Bull, Pepsi and Nescafé among them – are unmoved from last year’s list, although Nespresso has fallen from seventh to ninth. PepsiCo’s bottled water brand Aquafina has also fallen out of the list, after climbing to 15th place in 2014. Overall, the top 15 brands recorded a combined value of $153.6bn and demonstrated average year-on-year value growth of just more than 10%.
The only brand of the 15 to lose value during the last 12 months was Nescafé, and iced tea maker Lipton’s zero figure for value growth signifies that it is this year’s only new entry to the top 15.
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Coca-Cola was also the highest valued food and drink business generally, beating fast food retailer McDonald’s to eighth place by more than $2.5bn. Technology giant Apple was the world’s richest firm, worth nearly three times as much as Coca-Cola.
Kantar Worldpanel analyst Lauren Masotti said: “Our 25-year consumption trend shows that weekly consumption of carbonated soft drinks is rapidly decreasing, driven more so by diet variants in recent years. Some consumers prefer regular soft drinks to diet as they want to avoid the artificial sweeteners. Consumers who are still drinking the soft drink category are doing so less often, as soft drinks have become more of a permissible treat than a lifestyle beverage.”
Millward Brown executive vice president and chief global analyst Nigel Hollis added that brands took the greatest advantage from being “meaningfully different”.
Hollis said: “The Top 100 brands are all big and salient, but in many categories they struggle to be seen as meaningfully different. This works to their detriment because brands that are perceived as meaningfully different possess some important properties: They grow faster in response to marketing support; they are more resilient to competitive action; and they can command a price premium over close alternatives.
“The starting point for creating meaningful difference lies in defining what could make your brand be seen as different. To be a valuable asset, the differentiation created by the brand needs to be potentially meaningful to the target audience, sustainable and easily appreciated. Trivial line extensions or facelifts may be easily appreciated but they are unlikely to be meaningful or sustainable.”
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