BrandZ Most Valuable Brands’ list for the country category is released annually. BrandZ, the largest global brand equity platform covering over 100,000 brands across 45 countries, boasts that it provides the only brand valuation ranking that measures the contribution of the brand validated to in-market sales.
For three consecutive years, SAP ranked number one in the Top 50 BrandZ Most Valuable Brands in Germany for 2020 and was also named Europe’s most valuable brand for the second time.
SAP’s valuation of $50.9 billion has kept the company top-ranking in 2020. Meanwhile, 2nd placer Deutsche Telekom grew 9{8bf2b29f36318f0ac46ab1cc03d7035abce669a1cea16c9ed62389a818fa22fd} to $44.9 billion and Mercedes-Benz remained at 3rd at a valuation of $22.1 billion. For BrandZ’s country ranking, Germany is the most diverse with 18 industry sectors valued at $336 billion. This puts the country ahead of France, Spain, and the UK.
The Winning Brand Campaign
BrandZ Most Valuable Brands in 2020 have shown that creating a lasting memory of the company’s story and its image in customers’ minds are what make a strong brand. This means brands must be disruptive, leaders creative and companies remain innovative.
For SAP, “Experience Management is Here – The Future of Business Has Feelings” is the ultimate brand campaign. Capturing the spirit of the age, it has significantly grown its brand appeal adding approximately 24,000 new customers in 2019.
SAP in the Experience Economy
“We live in an experience economy, where brands compete on the basis of experience, and SAP is leading in enabling companies to build intelligent enterprises to run at their best to win the trust of customers for life, “ said Alicia Tillman, Chief Marketing Officer of SAP.
To Tillman, companies need to exert more effort in understanding their customers’ needs and expectations to deliver once-in-a-lifetime experiences.
SAP has consistently evolved through the years exemplifying BrandZ’s findings that strong brands engage swiftly and smartly in growth areas. From an enterprise resource planning (ERP) service provider, the German company is also now a solid end-to-end cloud provider expanding its target audience.
“We’re no longer concentrating on IT decision-makers. Increasingly, we need to reach a company’s line-of-business decision-makers and even its users, and pitch our solutions to them. That entails a fundamentally different approach: different messages, different channels, tactics, tools, and formats — and a much greater focus on business needs than on features and functions,” explained Kerstin Köder, Head of Marketing for Middle and Eastern Europe at SAP.
According to Köder, the company is holistically approaching customer journeys. She added:
“We’re using our own technology, Experience Management solutions, to gain the best possible understanding of target audiences and customer groups — and their touchpoints with SAP — and to optimize their customer experience accordingly.”
Trust, Experience, Holism
Christoph Prox, Managing Director of Kantar, said:
“Today, more than ever before, customers’ choices are influenced as much by their trust in a brand as by a first-class product experience.”
Now, customers’ trust encompasses the moral aspects of the company. The authors of BrandZ Most Valuable Brands 2020 have also identified that consumers of all ages attach great importance to the extent to which a brand or company takes a stance on key issues such as environment and social.
This year’s ranking gravitated towards the concept of “Holism”. As Kantar’s CEO Stefan Stumpp stated in his editorial for the BrandZ study, companies need to understand and look into every brand in its entirety, as the sum of all its parts.
