Consider the Gartner Top 25 Supply Chain companies and the 25 top Brandz Top 100 Global Brands. Notice anything?

Looking at the Gartner top 25 supply chain, 5 of the top 25 are also 5 of the top 25 global brands! In other words, 20% of the leading supply chain companies are also leading brands. Digging deeper, we find that 17 of the top 25 supply chain companies are also top 100 global brands, as mentioned in the BrandZ report. In other words, 68% of great supply chain companies are also leading global brands! Of the 8 companies that are not leading global brands, 3 are consumer good companies that have a large variety of brands (Unilever, Nestle, Johnson & Johnson), 1 is a primarily North American computer hardware provider (Dell), 2 are construction equipment giants and not expected to be a household name (Caterpillar and Cummins), 1 is a multinational manufacturing conglomerate with dozens of consumer and industrial brands (3M), and the last 1 produces chipsets for big-name mobile phone makers (Qualcomm). In other words, the only top 25 supply chain companies that are not top 100 global brands are precisely those companies that are not big consumer market companies or those companies that are conglomerates of a large number of smaller, but sometimes still Billion-dollar plus, companies.

And while it’s true that, at this point, this is just correlation, it’s a very significant correlation. While one may not be able to say that a great supply chain creates a great brand, these results seem to suggest that a great supply chain is needed for a great brand.