Every year, leading valuation and strategy consultancy Brand Finance values the brands of thousands of the world’s biggest companies. Brands are first evaluated to determine their power / strength (based on factors such as marketing investment, familiarity, loyalty, staff satisfaction and corporate reputation) and given a corresponding letter grade up to AAA+. Brand strength is used to determine what proportion of a business’s revenue is contributed by the brand, which is projected into perpetuity to determine the brand’s value. The world’s most valuable toy brands are ranked and included in the Brand Finance Toys 25 2017.
Click here to view the full list of the world’s 25 most valuable toy brands
Lego is the world’s most valuable toys brand, with a brand value that now stands at US$7.6 billion, over seven times that of second-placed Bandai Namco. It is also the industry’s strongest brand, and is in fact the most powerful brand across any industry category, as Brand Finance announced in its recently released Global 500 report.
Lego’s monobrand structure makes it a rarity within the industry, for example Mattel and Hasbro employ a house of brands approach. This structure helps to explain why, even accounting for its formidable brand strength, it is in a league of its own in terms of brand value. With so much attention and revenues flowing just to Lego’s unified brand, so other individual toy brand can challenge it in value terms.
Bandai Namco is the second most valuable and fastest growing brand. Its value grew an impressive 652% to US$1 billion. The combined name of Namco Bandai had only been applied in a corporate context but as of 2016, Bandai Namco has been applied across a range of consumer-facing products, ultimately increasing revenue attributable to the brand and thus, brand value.
The world has seen a 3% decline in sales of games and puzzles and Monopoly’s brand value reflects this trend, dropping 6% to US$132 million this year. Hasbro has attempted to modernise Monopoly by introducing new editions such as ‘Here and Now’ and ‘Ultimate Banking’ and by removing the thimble and flat iron tokens, a staple of the game since 1935. These efforts seem to have had a limited impact so far. Perhaps the rumoured Monopoly movie will reverse the trend and manage to replicate for Hasbro the huge commercial impact of the Lego Movies.
You can find more stories and information about the world’s most valuable toy brands in the Brand Finance Toys 25 report, view the report here.
