Biggest on the exchange, in the middle of the field
The C25 companies are Denmark's heaviest: the largest revenue, the most employees, the biggest marketing budgets. So surely their brands must be the strongest in the country too? We analysed the whole index with the same method as the rest of our base. The answer is no, and that is good news for everyone else.
The index sits level with the field
Measured across our disciplines, the C25 group as a whole sits broadly level with the full field of analysed brands. Not above it. In other words, the largest companies' overall brand level is no stronger than that of the typical Danish brand: the budgets have bought visibility and professional communication, but not measurably stronger brand work all the way round.
The surprise: no more distinctive assets, where you would expect most
Most striking are the distinctive assets. On the discipline for distinctive assets and mental availability, the index sits slightly BELOW the field. Companies that have had decades and billions to build recognition own, as a group, no more strong distinctive assets than the field's typical brand: four in five of them do not have a single one, against two in three in the field as a whole. Part of the explanation is probably the corporate form: many of the companies speak primarily to investors and professional customers, where logo and name do the work. But that does not change the measurement: the large budget has not turned into distinctive assets.
Where scale actually helps
The index is ahead in one place, and it is telling where: employer brand sits above the field's level. Career pages, employer campaigns and HR organisations show up in the measurement. But even here the level is low in absolute terms (even the country's largest employers show far less outwardly than you would think about why you should work specifically for them).
What this means for your brand
This is the democratic point of our whole data foundation: brand strength does not follow the balance sheet. A well-run brand with few employees can match, and on distinctive assets beat, companies with a thousand times the budget, because brand work rewards persistence and sharpness, not volume. Size gives distribution and awareness; it does not automatically give a strong brand. It has to be chosen and built, however large you are.
How we measured (method)
The figures are based on analyses of the C25 index's 24 companies (the Nasdaq list as of October 2026, where A.P. Møller - Mærsk counts as one company) compared with our full base of 351 Danish brands as of October 2026, all measured with the same method. We only discuss the index's overall figures and never individual companies' measurements; the analyses are based on the companies' own publicly available channels. Several of the companies are multi-brand groups; the measurement applies to the group brand on its own domain, and for each company the most recent measurement is used.