Top 25 Brands in Missouri

Any good marketing executive will tell you that a logo isn’t a brand. Brand stands for so much more—the quality of a company’s product or service, the way customers are treated, the overall shopping experience. For starters.

So not long ago, when Petco updated its logo a more modern look that jettisoned Ruff and Mews—the iconic images of a dog and cat that people had come to associate with the feel of Petco’s image—the blowback was swift, and it was intense. People wanted their animals back, even if they were just outlines on a logo. 

Like a dog leaving the room with its tail between its legs, the company soon sent out this Tweet: “Ruff and Mews are here to stay. Trust us.”

The Petco experience comes to mind as we consider the 25 strongest brands in Missouri, and what has earned them an elevated level of esteem in the minds of their customers, clients and competitors. As you review the companies recognized in this year’s Top Missouri Brands, note the differentiators that each company embraces to stamp its image into the minds of consumers.

Most of these 25 brands are national names that most everyone in America will recognize, but might not be known— even to the locals—as companies based in Missouri. Some are well-known to residents hereabouts, but perhaps not as fully appreciated across the nation.

Regardless, among the many corporate brands that the Show-Me State can call its own, some have an elevated awareness with consumers. As expected, St. Louis tops the list of brands by hometown—not much of a surprise, considering it is home to seven of the eight Missouri companies ranked in this year’s Fortune 500 companies. (Kansas City was shut out in that count.)

To be sure, assessing brand strength entails an element of subjectivity. Revenue alone does not command brand awareness, nor do factors like a company’s relevance to the business community or immense respect from clients. Do you agree with Ingram’s assessment? Let us know. Disagree? Make the reasoned argument that compels us to reconsider. Either way, we think that’s a discussion worth having, because it speaks to the broader conditions that support business success here and make this region strong.

And when that conversation is taking place, Missouri shines with a type of brand recognition all its own.

Ameren Corp.
With a footprint covering more than half the Show-Me State, Ameren Corp. is the biggest power provider for more than 1.2 million Missourians. Its reach extends well across the Mississippi into Illinois, but Ameren’s electric and gas services are available in 63 of Missouri’s 114 counties, plus the city of St. Louis. We’re talking about a lot of juice here: Net generating capacity of nearly 10,200 megawatts of electricity across 7,500 circuit miles of transmission lines. Coal-fired power plants generate the bulk of that, but Ameren operates the state’s only commercial nuclear-power plant—the Callaway Energy Center southeast of Fulton—and has hydroelectric generation facilities like the Bagnell Dam generating station on the Lake of the Ozarks. The company also distributes more natural gas than any other company in the state. Its holdings include Ameren Transmission Co., which designs and builds regional transmission projects. Overall, 9,000 people are on the company’s payroll.

American Century Investments
Investors in Kansas City and Missouri may know it as a local brand, but American Century now flexes its brand muscles around the world, with offices in London, Sydney, Hong Kong, and Frankfurt, in addition to its four U.S. locations. The biggest wealth-management firm in the Kansas City region got to be that way with a clear-cut mission. “Investment management,” it says, “is our sole business focus. No ancillary businesses compete with our clients or dilute our resources from adding value for our clients.” And that client value just keeps rocketing up the tables for investment firm assets under management: Kansas City-based American Century has surpassed the $250 billion mark there. It started in Missouri with $100,000 in seed money—a rounding error in the context of today’s AUM. It currently employs 1,400 people across that range of financial capitals, but none have the emotional link to American Century that hometown residents of Kansas City experience. That’s because the brand here is heavily intertwined with the Stowers Institute for Medical Research, established by American Century founder Jim Stowers and his wife, Virginia, with $2 billion of their personal wealth.

Anheuser-Busch Companies
If you don’t know the Anheuser-Busch brand or that of its family members, Budweiser, Michelob, Bud Light, and dozens of others, welcome to Earth: you must be visiting from another planet. Though now part of a global conglomerate AB Inbev, the St. Louis-based company probably won’t give up on its brands until the last grain of barley is harvested on this planet, perhaps not even then. Once again, AmeicanCraftBeer.com credits AB InBev with holding four aces in the deck of 10 top-selling brands in America, with Budweiser at No. 1 and Michelob right behind. Combined, those two brands alone account for more than $13 billion in sales—twice what other Top 10 competitors are able to claim. Other A-B brands of note are Busch and Natural Light (again, both labels as Top 10 sellers). A source of civic pride in St. Louis since its founding in 1852 and one of the city’s biggest employers, A-B, sold to InBev in 2008, with its brands joining a much bigger beer-lovers roster of 300 other brands and breweries worldwide.

Bass Pro Shops
Eight square feet. That’s how much space young Johnny Morris had to work with, setting up a counter to sell bait and fishing gear in his father’s Springfield liquor store in 1972. You want to talk brand-building strength: Fifty years later, it’s America’s biggest name in outdoor sporting gear, with fishing gear, boats, hunting and camping equipment, hiking and archery accessories, clothing, and more. In 2017, Morris extended the brand’s reach by doling out $4 billion to acquire competing Cabela’s. Now, those twin brands have more than 100 retail locations and a footprint that extends from coast to coast. Bass Pro has also carved out a brand presence in the conservation niche, leveraging its army of 200 million customers and industry partners to support various initiatives to keep the outdoors as close to its natural state as possible, efforts that its conservation partners say will pay off for generations to come.

BJC HealthCare
The undisputed heavyweight of health-care employment and services in Missouri is BJC HealthCare, a monolith operating two flagship hospitals in the St. Louis market—Barnes-Jewish Hospital and St. Louis Children’s Hospital. Combined, they employ nearly 31,000 health-care professionals and support staff. The St. Louis region has one of the nation’s premier names in medical services, research, and commercialization through the system’s affiliation with the prestigious Washington University School of Medicine. Those, in fact, are pillars of the organization’s mission to provide care, research, and instruction. The BJC fold also includes 13 other facilities, and systemwide, it delivers more than 4,700 physicians to the market, with more than 3,000 staffed beds. It admits more than 130,000 patients each year, generating more than $5.5 billion in revenue. BJC is also an exemplary corporate citizen with its charity and unreimbursed care, and every year, it yields more than $750 million in financial assistance, education of health professionals, safety net services and community outreach programs.

Boeing Co.
The F/A-18 Super Hornet, the F15-EX fighter jet, various missile, and space-system components—are all part of the product line that makes Boeing a household name in St. Louis and one of the biggest brand names operating in Missouri.  With 14,500 people on the payroll at its St. Louis facilities, it’s also one of the largest private-sector employers in the Show-Me State. Of course, the Boeing brand stands tall with hundreds of millions of air travelers worldwide, thanks to the commercial-aviation products rolling out of factories in Washington state, Wichita, and other locations. The defense unit traces its roots back to the McDonnell Douglas Corp., which was acquired by Boeing in 1997 but was allowed to remain as an operating unit of the merged company. The C-suites were relocated to Arlington, Va., in 2017, but Boeing Defense, Space & Security continues to be a vibrant brand for the St. Louis region and a key component of Defense Department research through its Phantom Works operations, operating from a plant at Lambert–St. Louis International Airport.

Burns & McDonnell
Kansas City, it’s been said, employs more engineers on a per-capita basis than any other American metro area. A big reason it’s able to make that boast is because it’s the global headquarters for Burns & McDonnell, often thought of as an engineering firm, but in fact, is an engineering, construction, and consulting amalgam with nearly $5 billion in annual revenue. With a remade Kansas City campus that expanded its footprint and created offices for several thousand additional workers, Burns & McDonnell is far from the two-man operation upon its 1898 founding. The brand has powerful recognition in two realms: First, within the engineering/design space, but with its offices in Kansas City and St. Louis, a broader recognition among Missourians for the civic contributions it makes and the quality of the workplace it has created as an employer. More than 4,000 of the company’s 10,000 employees work at the headquarters campus.

Centene Corp.
If revenue growth is your metric for brand strength, you won’t find many in Missouri stronger than Centene. In 2021, this seller of government-subsidized health insurance products saw its revenues climb by nearly $15 billion to hit $126 billion. For those of you keeping score at home, that’s a year-over-year pop of 13 percent, a growth rate almost unheard of for a company with a 12-figure baseline. Founded in 1984 as a non-profit Medicaid plan, Centene today is the nation’s largest Medicaid managed-care organization. It began through the leadership of the late Betty Brinn, who founded it as Family Hospital Physician Associates but saw explosive growth under the leadership of Michael Neidorff, who died earlier this year. He led the creation of the Centene brand, moving the headquarters to St. Louis, and orchestrating its first public offering in 2001. It’s also the nation’s largest insurance carrier on the federal Health Insurance Marketplace, created as part of the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010, and contracts with the Defense Department to provide managed-care for military families.

Commerce Bank
A handful of banks may have more deposits within various submarkets, and a handful may have more locations, but only one bank puts the metrics together to make a strong claim as being the strongest statewide banking brand based in Missouri: Commerce Bank. The bank’s statewide appeal reflects that its leadership ranks are divided between St. Louis and Kansas City, while the latter still retains headquarters recognition from the FDIC. Its most recent regulatory filing showed Commerce with $34.8 billion in assets, up more than $1.5 billion year-over-year. A contributing factor to that growth is an organizational mindset that views every transaction as a consumer verdict on the brand’s appeal. The bank has enjoyed additional polish on its reputation in recent years with a run of appearances near the top of Forbes’ annual list of the best-managed banks in the nation. Founded in 1865, it’s the oldest continuous bank operating in Kansas City.

Edward Jones
Among financial-services firms in Missouri, it’s hard to think of one with more brand clout than St. Louis-based Edward Jones. There are a great many good reasons for that: The firm is managing more than $1.6 trillion in client assets. The company, which celebrates its centennial this year, has steadfastly defied corporate trends that define many financial-services organizations of that scale and cherishes its status as a privately-held entity. There is, within that structure, a particular brand appeal all its own: “We’re able to focus on relationships, rather than shareholder returns,” the company says. Its namesake founded the company in a single room with a desk, three chairs, and a hat rack back in 1922; today, it has more than 15,000 offices in the United States and Canada, providing investment advisory and other services to more than 8 million clients.

Emerson
More than 20 years after rebranding to reflect a much broader scope in electrical services, many locals still refer to it as “Emerson Electric.” Every time it gets typed that way, somebody just wasted eight keystrokes: It’s just Emerson, thank you, and it’s been that way since 2000. It’s a global supplier of highly diversified products and services, data-center infrastructure, and management, having vastly expanded its offerings within those disciplines, while its legacy enterprises continue with the sales of electric appliances and parts. St. Louis is home to about 1,300 employees out of a global workforce of 83,000 strong, focused on everything from design and installation of industrial-scale production facilities to providing HVAC services in residential and commercial settings. “Everything but the kitchen sink” does not apply here: The company also cranks out waste-disposal units … for the kitchen sink. All told, the company racked up $18.3 billion in sales last year, a healthy year-over-year pop of $1.3 billion. Founded in St. Louis in 1890, not long after the dawn of the electrical power age, the company had its roots in the production of electric motors, floor and ceiling fans, and blade design.

Energizer Holdings
Energizer is the Big Kahuna brand of the holding company that produces that line of batteries, but two others in that space—Eveready and Rayovac—are all part of the Energizer family of brands, giving this St. Louis-based company a commanding share of the market for portable power. But the ability to reach consumers doesn’t stop there: Energizer divisions also make and distribute headlights, lanterns, children’s lights, and area lights. Other products in the portfolio include ArmorAll, Eagle One, STP, and Nu Finish, names especially familiar to those buying car-care products. All told, they were good for 2021 sales of $3.2 billion at this Fortune 1000 company, up a snappy $500 million over 2020, which yielded a healthy 10 percent increase despite being the worst stretch of the global pandemic. Operating worldwide, the parent employs 5,900 people, with about 2,400 of those in the U.S.

Enterprise Holdings
Are you an Enterprise car-rental enthusiast? Or does your preference run to Alamo? What about National? The fact is, if you’re choosing between any one of the three, you’re an Enterprise Holdings customer, which over the years has acquired struggling competitors, brought them into the fold, and captured 60 percent of the U.S. rental market along the way. Industry insiders calculate that the Enterprise brands account for 1.1 million cars in service across the country, and those combined brands are available through 6,000 locations. That puts its vehicle count more than twice as large as its nearest competitor, Hertz. A 33-year-old Navy veteran named Jack Taylor launched the company in 1957 as a one-man band with an accompaniment of just seven vehicles. Why Enterprise? It was Taylor’s homage to the Big E, the aircraft carrier on which he had served during World War II. Pam Nicholson, who succeeded Jack’s son Andy, is the company’s chief executive officer today.

Evergy
Merging two well-established brands in the investor-owned utility world presented a challenge when Great Plains Energy got together with Westar Energy in 2018, after years of failed courtship attempts. What to call it? Great Star? Western Energy? Turns out, something new was waiting behind Door No. 3: Evergy. Company officials say they dove deep into responses from customers and employees before coming up with wordplay that combined “ever”—for reliability— and “energy” for … well, of course, energy. “Evergy conveys our proud history as a reliable, enduring source of energy for our community and our vision to continue being so far into the future,” they declared upon the unveiling of the brand. The Evergy name now shows up monthly on the utility bills of roughly 1 million customers in a market that runs from western Missouri to south-central Kansas. It carries more than just a power-source identity for customers: Evergy is also an active partner in helping residential consumers and businesses manage their consumption patterns and volumes to keep the power flowing affordably during times of peak demand.

H&R Block
Another Missouri brand that started small—two brothers working out of a Midtown Kansas City office in 1955—but is now global is that of H&R Block. It’s not just Kansas City’s leading provider of tax-preparation services; neither is it just the biggest one in Missouri or the U.S. Block is the world’s biggest in that space. The publicly traded company draws on a network of 60,000 tax professionals, prepping 21.6 million individual returns in 2021 and providing guidance for 8.9 million more who opt to file themselves. Commercial clients can also tap into H&R Block’s expertise with payroll and business consulting services. Combined, the various service lines spit out $3.4 billion in 2021 revenues. And its brand appeal extends beyond those needing help navigating IRS forms: In 2021, Forbes magazine designated it among the best employers for new graduates.  It previously recognized Block as being one of the world’s best companies to work for, as well as one of its Best Employers for Women.

Hallmark
Once upon a time, Hallmark sold greeting cards. But this isn’t 1910, and it’s not Joyce Hall’s start-up dream: Today’s Hallmark is a global brand in the expanded field of personal expressions, and its 27,000 employees worldwide help generate a $3.5 billion revenue powerhouse based in Kansas City. It’s hard to overstate Hallmark’s impact on this region’s creative class, as hundreds of its employee alumni have moved on to start their own enterprises in graphic design, photography, print production, and other lines of creative output. Consider this: Hallmark’s army of artists and designers crank out 10,000 new and redesigned messages a year, and you can find that not just on their greeting cards but on gift wrap, invitations, announcements, keepsakes, and other products. And you can find those in dozens of languages at retail outlets in more than 100 countries. Online competition has been an ongoing challenge for more than 25 years, but Hallmark continues to assert its brand in that hyper-charged competition, with 2,000 of its 27,000 employees worldwide working at the headquarters.

Helzberg Diamonds
The C-Suite had a bit of a makeover just last month as CFO Brad Hampton assumed the leadership role upon the retirement of Beryl Raff, Warren Buffet’s hand-picked choice for that position back in 2009. But don’t expect new faces around the leadership ranks to tinker much with a brand that has strong consumer recognition: Helzberg Diamonds operates more than 170 stores nationwide. Seven years into its second century, Helzberg continues to dazzle with diamonds and other precious gems that help commemorate milestone moments in life—engagements, weddings, graduations, promotions, and the like—as well as gifts like watches and accessories that will always be remembered. Founded in Kansas City and operated by three generations of the namesake family before Buffett made them an offer they couldn’t refuse back in 1996, the company is another corporate thoroughbred in his Berkshire-Hathaway stable. The brand is built on a corporate commitment to customers first, quality over everything, and commitment to the community.

Kansas City Chiefs
The perception of a brand rises and falls on its organizational performance, but how many organizations compare with professional sports teams in their exposure to varying consumer tastes and loyalties year-over-year? Case in point: The Kansas City Chiefs. Before Andy Reid showed up as coach in 2013, the Chiefs had posted losing marks in six of the previous seven seasons, including a pair of 2-14 efforts in the No. 1 draft-choice sweepstakes. Suffice to say; the brand was aching. Today? Let’s see . . . back-to-back Super Bowl appearances in 2020 and 2021, an NFL record of four straight conference championship games at home, and six straight AFC West division titles—yup, it’s fair to say the Chiefs brand is stronger today than perhaps at any time in the nearly 60 years that the club has been in Kansas City. And, thanks to what many consider some under-handed moves by the former St. Louis Rams to deprive that city of an NFL franchise, the Chiefs today are more an all-Missouri brand than ever.

Missouri State University
With nearly 25,000 students on its main campus in Springfield and satellite operation in West Plains, Missouri State University is by far the second-largest public university in the state. With 112-degree programs, it flexes its programming muscle nearly on par with its larger cousin in Columbia. Founded in 1905, it has swapped brands over the years and considering that it started with the less-than snappy moniker of Fourth District Normal School, that’s been a good thing. In 1919, the brand evolved to Southwest Missouri State Teachers college to better align with its mission, then fine-tuned again in 1945 and 1972 before declaring itself Missouri State U. in 2005. The goal with that final move was to reflect MSU’s size, scope, elevated admission standards, and increased numbers of graduate programs, which set a university record for enrollment last fall. Last year, it awarded more than 5,000 degrees and an additional 765 certifications, making it
an integral component of southwest Missouri’s—and the state’s—work-force development.

Nestle Purina PetCare Co.
Here’s a company with two major national brand names going for it: Nestlé, better-known for the space it occupies in with food products and confections for humans, and Purina, the long-time leader in animal feed. Combined under the current brand, this division of parent Nestlé bucked the trend among the parent’s other holdings. While the company overall was down 8.9 percent from 2019 revenues, the pet care division turned in an impressive 2.8 percent increase in sales—perhaps Fido’s appetite was worked up by all those walks that people were taking while stuck at home during pandemic lockdowns. It remains the nation’s second-largest pet food and pet products company, trailing only Mars Petcare, with its output of dog and cat food, treats, and pet-care products, from brands like Alpo and Beneful to Friskies and Fancy Feast, to Beggin’ treats and Tidy Cats litter. The Purina side of the corporate DNA came when William Danforth founded the feed company in 1894, creating a family legacy that would later include a one-time U.S. senator and a chancellor at Washington University.

O’Reilly Auto Parts
It had a long way to go in brand-building when Charlie O’Reilly amassed a team of 13 to start his auto-parts empire back in 1957. Today, it’s one of the most-recognized brands not just in Missouri, but across the nation, with a team of nearly 78,000 and stores in nearly every U.S. state—more than 5,700 combined—and two dozen more in Mexico under the ORMA brand. Consumers have been holding onto their vehicles longer since the pandemic-induced squeeze on global supply chains began in 2020, and that’s been a good thing for companies selling replacement parts for vehicles. And we’re not just talking cars and trucks here; O’Reilly Auto has a vast range of retail and online products that allow professionals and do-it-yourselfers to service and repair boats and motorcycles, as well. Fueling the organizational growth, officials say, is a blend of broad product selection for patrons and a no-excuses commitment to customer service.

Panera Bread
With nearly 2,200 retail locations across the nation, St. Louis-based Panera is a highly recognized brand in the bakery-cafe link of restaurant chains. The brand stands for tasty, healthy, and natural food, having picked up numerous awards for those traits from various publications. Those of you who still recall your Latin classes may recognize the name as standing for “bread basket”. The brand-development gurus say it’s actually a combination of the Italian words for bread (pan) and time (era). But there’s a lot more for Panera customers than sandwiches—there are plenty of soups, salads, and dessert baked goods to go along with that ham on artisan rye. When it launched in 1987, it was billed as St. Louis Bread Co., and in 1993, it became part of the Au Bon Pain family in a $23 million acquisition. In its hometown, it still carries dual branding with its original name, and residents there are hungry enough to support nearly two dozen locations in the St. Louis region.

St. Louis Cardinals
When you’ve got a winning brand that connects on a visceral level with your customers, you tinker with it at your peril—and only around the edges, if at all. So when the St. Louis Cardinals rolled out a new logo in 2019 and stepped up its usage in 2020, the modifications were minor: The “STL” emphasis was never in doubt. The fans in Gateway City are famed for their loyalty to the club: BleacherReport.com, at one point, ranked St. Louis as the No. 1 franchise with fans, ahead of the major population markets of New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Why? Because the Cards consistently sell out games, even as the on-field performance fluctuates from year to year. A talk-bout stadium experience doesn’t hurt, and management knows how to leverage the team’s status to make it No. 1 with fans, making it “a baseball city in the purest sense of the word,” the site declares.

University of Missouri
The University of Missouri is a brand all its own, but it’s really the parent in a family of four, serving as the flagship campus for a statewide system that reaches from its home base in Columbia to embrace St. Louis, Kansas City, and Rolla. On campus and online, it offers an unmatched 260-degree programs, making it the focal point of higher education in Missouri. More than 31,400 undergraduate students agree, according to enrollment figures from the fall of 2021. Studies calculate that Mizzou as a system yields a $3.9 billion impact on the state of Missouri, in large part because more than 46,800 people (employees, faculty, vendors, and suppliers) cash a paycheck, either directly or indirectly, as a result of the Columbia campus’ economic gravity. In addition, they say, MU drives state and local tax revenues on food, gas, and lodging by a combined $117 million. One aspect of campus life that can’t be overlooked is the athletic program, which brings hundreds of thousands of ticket-holding fans to Columbia for football in the fall, basketball in the winter, and other Division I sports.

Washington University
Missouri, as we’ve seen, has no shortage of brands that resonate globally. Washington University in St. Louis is no exception. How do we back up that claim? Consider the expertise of U.S. News & World Report with its annual rankings in higher education. Most recently, it bumped WashU up two spots within its Top 20 nationwide, ranking it No. 14. That placed it ahead of Notre Dame, UCLA, Cal-Berkeley, Michigan, Southern Cal, and a host of other “name” universities in America. It’s a crown jewel of academic study, research, and service for St. Louis and Missouri. Forming its pillars of instructional excellence disciplines are Art & Architecture, Arts & Sciences, Engineering, Law, Medicine, Social Work, Public Health, Continuing Education, and perhaps the best-known program of its kind in the Midwest, the Olin School of Business. An almost-unheard-of student-to-faculty ratio of 7:1 is a big selling point with prospective students, and graduate programs account for more than half of the nearly 16,000 students enrolled there. That makes the university a huge talent generator for the Show-Me State.