A message from our CEO and Chairman

Welcome to Tenet’s 2016 Top 100 Most Powerful Brands report.

The contribution that ‘intangible assets’ make to the US economy is undeniable. In fact, recent studies show that roughly 84% of the value of the S&P 500 is made up of intangible assets including corporate brands.^*

Although a company’s brand is considered an intangible asset with significant value, the value of a brand is not calculated on the corporate balance sheet until it is bought or sold. Most companies will at some point be acquired, merge, or buy other companies – but until one these events happen, brands are not managed as a balance sheet asset. Further to this point, leading companies invest significant resources in their brand-building initiatives, but management and investors don’t have a clear view into the brand and the true impact it has on the company’s value. Without question, management, boards and investors must understand how brand performance is linked to business performance and value creation.

To help companies determine their corporate brand performance and brand value, Tenet’s CoreBrand^® Index (CBI) was created to answer a single question – “What does a brand contribute to a company’s value?” Today, our CoreBrand Index is the only research methodology and analytical model that yields data from a continuous examination of a company’s brand and the factors that contribute to enterprise value.

Every year of over 25 consecutive years, we track nearly 1,000 different companies across 50 industries to develop the benchmark data for our CoreBrand Index. It is from this data that we derive the findings for our annual Top 100 Most Powerful Brands report. 2016 marks our 9th annual publication of this ranking.

This also marks a milestone for Tenet and the world of branding and marketing. CoreBrand Data provides the foundation for the first ever investable Index that identifies stocks that are exhibiting a discount of brand and intangible asset value to market capitalization. Developed by BrandTransact^® Worldwide, the launch of the BrandTransact^® 50 (BTW50) is a watershed moment, and we are proud to be a key partner in helping investors tap into unrealized value of companies whose share value has not yet been fully recognized by the US markets. Over a five-year period through August 2015, the BTW50 Index outperformed the S&P 500 by over 500 basis points.

We hope this report and the case studies within provide a deeper understanding of key trends for individual companies, for different sectors, and for the market as a whole. Ultimately our mission is to help executives and investors gain the knowledge they need to unlock the power of a company’s most important asset – their brand.

Congratulations to the Top 100 Most Powerful Brands of 2016.

Hampton Bridwell
CEO, Tenet Partners

James Gregory
Chairman, Tenet Partners

^* (Source: Ocean Tomo, LLC)