Lego unseats Ferrari as world’s most powerful brand

Sorry, Ferrari. In its annual ranking of the world’s most powerful brands, a British consulting firm has crowned Lego master brand builder.

Lego, which has been making the iconic plastic building sets since 1949, scored highest in Brand Finance’s “brand strength” index, which measures factors such as familiarity, loyalty, promotion, staff satisfaction and corporate reputation to determine brand power.

The wide acclaim of “The Lego Movie” helped propel Lego from a well-loved toy brand to the top spot, Brand Finance said. Also: “In a tech-saturated world, parents approve of the back-to-basics creativity it encourages and have a lingering nostalgia for the brand long after their own childhoods,” the firm said in a release.

Denmark-based Lego unseats Italian carmaker Ferrari, which dropped to ninth place. After several years without a Formula One title and strategic changes in its road car division to relax production caps to boost revenue, potentially at the expense of exclusivity, Ferrari’s “sheen of glory from its 1990s golden era is beginning to wear thin,” Brand Finance said.

Apple, meanwhile, was declared the world’s “most valuable brand” for the fourth-straight year. The category combines brand strength with the company’s financial data to determine commercial value. Brand Finance put Apple’s brand value at $128 billion.

Twitter, though much smaller at $4.4 billion brand value, was the fastest grower, tripling its brand value over the past year.

Brand value is calculated by determining the value that a company would be willing to pay to license its brand as if it did not own it, according to an explanation of the company’s methodology on its website. That involves estimating the future revenue attributable to a brand and calculating a royalty rate that would be charged for use of the brand.