Brand valuation: how convergent (or divergent) are global brand rankings and how correlated is brand value to enterprise value?

Commercial providers of brand valuations often incorporate measures of brand equity into their constructs, bonding brand equity to brand value. While preserving their methodologies and estimation algorithms, some of them disclose valuable information. For instance, Brand Finance, Interbrand, and Kantar BrandZ publish the most valuable global brand rankings and reports annually. Inexplicably, academics underuse this invaluable knowledge. This research aims to figure out how convergent (or divergent) brand valuation rankings are and to investigate the correlation between brand value (BV) and enterprise value (EV) in different industry categories. The investigation spans 107 global brands in 13 industry categories, measuring the variability across brand valuation rankings from 2016 to 2021. Means of coefficients of variation $$(\overline{{{\text{CV}}}}_{\text{by}})$$ ( CV ¯ by ) confirm the high-level variability among them. Differences in methodologies, particularly concerning brand equity measurement, may explain the observed high variability. Findings show that Kantar BrandZ estimates brand values significantly higher than Brand Finance and Interbrand. Thomson Reuters provides enterprise value data for regression analysis. The study concludes that there is a strong association between BV and EV of global brands in all rankings and most industry categories analyzed, despite significant discrepancies across the brand value estimations made by Brand Finance, Interbrand, and Kantar BrandZ.