RBC is the lone Canadian company to claim a spot in the 2025 Kantar BrandZ Most Valuable Global Brands report.
The bank had the biggest year-over-year brand-value growth of any financial-services firm outside the U.S. at 43% and claimed the top spot among Canadian companies in last year’s survey as well.
The Kantar BrandZ report covers 22,000 brands in 538 categories and assesses how companies translate consumer perceptions into financial results to assess a brand value.
RBC placed 59th overall after finishing 64th in 2024. Canadian companies TD Bank and Lululemon fell out of the top 100 in 2025.
Georgia Balinsky, VP and global head of brand and creative at RBC, attributes the bank’s success to streamlined approach to marketing.
“Across the industry, marketers and managers have this natural reflex to overfill the brand, putting so much into the articulation of the brand and its strategy, that it all becomes difficult to execute,” Balinsky said in the report.
It’s easier to adapt, remix, reinterpret and rethink a company’s identity when a brand definition is relentlessly simple, she says.
Apple claimed the top spot, followed by Google and Microsoft. McDonald’s slipped out of the top five into the eighth spot. Rounding out the list are Amazon (4), NVIDIA (5), Facebook (6), Instagram (7), Oracle (9) and Visa (10).
Samsung’s position dropped by 27 places year-over-year and Nike fell 24 spots. Tech companies VMWare and Huawei made large leaps in the ranking, rising 33 and 32 spots respectively.
Sweden’s Spotify re-entered the global top 100 at number 76.
Seventh-ranked Instagram and 32nd place TikTok posted growth of 101% and 25% respectively, reflecting social-media platforms’ continued influence on consumer habits.
Brands that disrupted their category or reinvented themselves have accounted for almost three-quarters (71%) of the $9.3 trillion USD in incremental value created in the global top 100 since 2006.
