Resilient brands recover faster, so if marketers aren’t investing in brand they are failing to build the roof while the sun is shining. Kantar’s Jane Ostler explains.
It’s been a challenging week for the tech sector, with stocks hitting their lowest point since April. And, over the past couple of weeks, we have also seen tech companies (first AWS, swiftly followed by Microsoft) facing outages affecting thousands of companies and millions of end users. We trust the infrastructure we pay for to work as it should: water, electricity, the BBC, and the cloud. So, for these brands that provide a service that we all rely on, incidents like this could have big reputational and commercial implications.
The good news is that both of the tech giants impacted by outages are well-positioned to ride out the storm.
AWS is the third-largest brand in the business tech sector by brand value – the brand alone is worth almost $500m, and its value has grown 32% in the past year. Ease of use is a big selling point for AWS’s offer– as a challenger to some of the established names, it was able to borrow UX learnings from the consumer side of its operations, as well as offer a greater agility and flexibility than the structured database systems offered by its competitors.
Microsoft takes first place in our BrandZ business tech brand ranking – with Nvidia in 2nd place completing the podium.
And that’s important in times like this. Kantar’s data shows that strong brands perform better, are more resilient and grow faster in the long run. And this isn’t just theory – our data shows that brand perceptions really can move the needle commercially. This matters even more for B2B brands, where consumers don’t have direct experience of their services – and where headlines about incidents like this might be one of their few interactions with the brand.
But what are the rules of building strong B2B brands? Helpfully, the same rules of brand growth apply to any brand; the audience and tone may differ, but the principles remain the same. Brands grow by being meaningfully different to more people – by meeting people’s emotional and practical needs, and by standing out from competitors.
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Investing in brand offers a kind of insurance against the operational pitfalls that any business may face. An example I love to cite is Airbnb – it’s a great case study on the perils of neglecting your brand. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the brand’s marketing strategy was primarily performance-driven. But when the pandemic hit, this strategy met its limit. CMO Hiroki Asai said at the time: “The problem was that Airbnb wasn’t able to put its own message out into people’s minds and out into the market, so the messages were being driven by reactive PR and comms and basically what the world and what social media was talking about. Airbnb kind of lost control of the brand a little bit – and of the message and the narrative.”
This need to build a clear brand narrative is one of the reasons we see B2B brands investing in strengthening connections with broader audiences. In 2025, 18 of the top 20 business tech brands have sports partnerships – spanning motor racing, tennis, NFL, football, golf, basketball, and hockey – all with the aim of creating positive associations and saliency. AWS has even taken home a trophy from Kantar’s Creative Effectiveness Awards – which celebrate the most effective ads in the world – for this heartwarming TV ad about a tech-savvy grandpa.
So, these tech giants are well-positioned to recover from the impact of these outages, disruptive as they have been. Brand strength adds resilience because it offers reassurance to buyers – whether they are spending their own money or their companies’ IT budget. In good times, strong brands grow value faster. And the global financial crisis and COVID pandemic taught us that in tough times, strong brands recover more quickly.
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