[scollins]

Originally Posted by Acemetrical

Is this most powerful brands as in brand exposure, loyalty, recognition, respect, what?

It makes a big difference.

Those questions are answered in the FAQ in the .pdf link. But here is their explanation of what they are showing:

How We Calculate Brand Value
Brand Value is the financial value of a brand, defined as the sum of all earnings that a brand is expected to generate.
For the purpose of the BrandZ ranking, Millward Brown Optimor values brands in three steps:
1. Establish a company’s intangible earnings and allocate them to individual brands and countries of operation, based on publicly available financial data from Bloomberg, Datamonitor (www.datamonitor.com) and Millward Brown Optimor’s own research.
2. Determine the portion of intangible earnings attributable to brand alone, as opposed to other factors such as price. This metric, known as Brand contribution, reflects the share of earnings from a product or service’s most loyal consumers or users. For this second step, we use research-based loyalty data from the BrandZ database.
3. Project the brand value forward based on market valuations, the brand’s risk profile, and its growth potential. Data for this step is sourced from the BrandZ database, Bloomberg and Millward Brown Optimor’s own research. Using these growth inputs, we create the final metric available from the BrandZ ranking, Brand Momentum, the index of the brand’s short-term growth potential.

Brand Value
Step 1: Intangible Earnings
Intangible corporate earnings allocated toeach brand by country, based on company and analyst reports, industry studies, revenue estimates, etc.

Step 2: Brand Contribution
Portion of intangible earnings attributable to brand.
Directly driven by BrandDynamicsTM Loyalty Pyramid and Category segmentation collected wihin the BRANDZTM study.

Step 3: Brand Multiple
Brand earnings multiple. Calculated based on market valuations, brand growth potential and VoltageTM as measured by BrandDynamics.