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Apple, Google World's Top Brands
Anil Kandangath writes "BrandChannel readers have picked the top global brands for 2004. Apple is the leader, closely followed by Google. Arab-centric Al-Jazeera ranks fifth in global as well as Europe/Africa ratings. In regionwise ratings, Google tops North America, Ikea tops Europe/Africa, Sony tops Asia-pacific while Mexican cement brand Cemex tops Latin America An interesting fact is that Steve Jobs headed Apple is the top North American brand while his other venture Pixar comes fifth in the same zeitgeist."
Too bad my favorite Big Green Guy didn't make the list! ;-)
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
because a tiny niche insignificant internet website says so !!
Al-Jazeera on top? That's funny!
First post!
Coke, Pepsi, McDonalds...whatever
If you look at the age groups of the people that voted I bet that almost all teenagers would account for Apple being first place and then all the adults and business pros would pick Google because that use it every day (ands its free!).
Dashboard Widgets
WTF!? I was expecting SCO to be somewhere up there! ;)
Do you even know what the word means, cockbarrel?
I can't say 1 of them shocked me.
Then again, I think with the advent of the net, things are changing.
10 years ago, not many of us Americans would know so many European brands, but now that we see ads for european products (even if they aren't available in the US), articles, etc. etc...
it's sometimes hard to remember what is in the US or not.
I'm guessing in another 10 years, that continental divide will close even more.
Amazing that Apple and Pixar both beat Coca-Cola! I'm a big fan of both, but it's hard to imagine that Coke doesn't have a larger following worldwide.
It appears that their North America ratings leave out a large number of countries from Mexico south to the Colombian border which are also part of North America.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Accused of bias . . . , Al Jazeera presents an alternative point of view to those who until recently had only CNN or BBC to supply "world" news views.
Is this surprising?
Or do we in the west believe that CNN/BBC/BBQ/whatever are not biased?
Apple's always been one of the strongest brands out there, at least in my eyes. Until I switched(tm), I always loved their design and even just the look and feel of all things Apple. I think that's what makes them such a cult favorite. (Ok, cult may not be the right word, but you get where I'm going.)
Steve Jobs strength is that he makes good decisions. However a lot of Apple's loyalty can be attributed to Guy Kawasaki, who is credited with creating the image that attracts crazed fanboys. /crazed fanboy
i love it when people use words thinking they are clever when they dont even understand the meaning of them
Zeitgeist is a German word. Zeit meaning "time" and Geist meaning "ghost," Zeitgeist means the spirit of the age or times
so i the context used in the summary it is a completely inappropriate usage, but as Google use it for their statistics page it must be cool
No Nike, no Marlboro, no Coke? Who picked the brands in that article, the readers of Us magazine?
Where am I to go, now that I've gone too far?
Seeing Starbucks in there reminded me of a great ad I saw in Sunday's paper. Wales is now advertising itself as a tourist destination based on its historical heritage, and the fact it's still relatively unspoiled by the various global brands that homogenise most city centres in England. The advert is a double page photo of the inside of Cardiff Castle with the slogan
:
"Wales
641 Castles
5 Starbucks."
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
And where stands our beloved community?! Must be a top five brand for geeks?
Well, they are brands. Martha Stewart Living? Her name is the brand. There's of people who've turned their names into brands:
Vidal Sassoon
Tommy Hilfiger
Colonel Sanders
Antoine Bugleboy
Lazslo Panaflex
etc.
The list goes on and on.
Unknown host pong.
While it's comforting that Microsoft was not amongst the brands listed, I don't know how Al Jazeera can a) be considered a brand, and b) the fact that it is up there seems somewhat disturbing... All I ever hear about Al Jazeera is how they always seem to have new tapes from various terrorists...
To make them truly unstoppable you could combine two top brands together!. Mmmmm Apple and McDonalds.
Why is Europe and Africa lumped together into one category? Is it the similar demographics?
This is not the sig you are looking for...
Wow! A whopping 1984 respondents worldwide, of which the US& Canada make up about 50%. Seems a bit skewed to me.
Ruger
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Only professionals in the advertising bussines were questionned?!
At any given time since a couple of weeks there's a front story about Apple. Now the Apple Mini and IShuffle were news. But now this one and yesterday it was about a loser who crammed pc parts in the Mac Mini. Is Apple's the new google?
This is a stolen sig.
...
An interesting fact is that Steve Jobs headed Apple is the top North American brand
So which one is it?
I bet more people know of apple the fruit than apple the company
did you forget to take your meds?
This was the "Reader's Choice" award for brandchannel.com. As an online survey, it would be heavily weighted towards technology companies such as Apple and Google.
Brands such as Q-tips, Kleenex, Jell-O, Cheerios, Jiff, the Green Bay Packers, and Tide all probably have higher recognition rates as a percentage of the total (US) population.
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
No brazilian company between the Latin America top 5 is really awesome. I don't mean Cemex dosen't have merits, it's just that most brazilian companies work on almost every latin american contries, see Petrobras as a example, they even work on africa and middle east.
Google's search statistics may be regarded as a similar but more accurate poll because of the much bigger sample space.
The problem is that their statistics are biased towards brands/corporations which have a bigger web presence (eg Amazon, etc) which occur in their "Top Consumer Brands" category. Hence companies like Cemex, Samsung etc do not figure in the Google Zeitgeist.
On a related note, SCO seems to be proud it figured in the Google Zeitgeist. The following quote from the "news" on their webpage (couldn't find permanent link):
SCO Ranked #1 Corporate Query Site by Google. Based on billions of searches conducted by Google users around the world, the 2004 Year-End Zeitgeist ranks SCO's corporate Website as the most searched site for the year. Find Out More Here >
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Where's Coca Cola? If i remind correct, they've been the top brand of recent years, followed by McDonalds and Nokia.
I work in the branding industry. I have to say, brandchannel.com is owned by Interbrand. There is a conflict of interest. Interbrand is one of the larger branding and identity firms, and they do try to be unbiased. I wouldn't say that they are just "some little website that says," but then are not an uninvolved 3rd party.
I did my own survey and found their results to be totally skewed. Among my respondants, Cheetos was the number-one brand worldwide. It was closely followed by Kool-Aid and Ruffles. I completed my survey in the 7-11 only last night, but the results are shocking! Plus, my margin of error is only a tiny bit greater than their survey. I mean, 1900 some-odd out of what, 6 or 7 billion is pretty close to 5 out of 6 or 7 billion. I demand a recount!
http://xkcd.com/386/
Nice to see "BrandChannel" readers know what the hell they're talking about. That new Lagos Ikea is pretty nice, but I prefer the one in Brazzaville myself.
Europe and Africa?
Why the hell are Europe and Africa being lumped together? It's not as if they share that much in any cultural way.
Maybe I should RTFA.
So Interbrand asks some people who are very interested in branding what they think the top brands are. Who cares? The whole concept of a brand is to make a lasting, favorable on your customers and potential customers.
Pixar is the fifth-highest rated brand in North America? Come off it. I bet not one person in five could say who they are, let alone what they like about them. Coke, Pepsi, Levis, McDonald's, Sony, Toyota, VW all would have much higher name recognition and positive associations than Pixar not matter how good a company Pixar is (or, for example, how gross a lot of people think Mickey D's burgers are).
Insert witty sig here.
I'm intrigued that a cement company is the most well-known brand in Latin America - it seems unusual that such an industrial commodity has managed to become a household name even though most people will have never bought any of their products directly. Maybe this reflects the amount of construction occurring in these nations at the moment?
One good turn - gets all the covers.
"We" also consider them to be part of North America. Central America is a sub-region of it. Latin America includes soutbern North America, and all of South America.
From dictionary.com: "The northern continent of the Western Hemisphere, extending northward from the Colombia-Panama border and including Central America, Mexico, the islands of the Caribbean Sea, the United States, Canada, the Arctic Archipelago, and Greenland.
It is a common geographic error, like those who think that Asia only means the Pacific shore at the very eastern edge of the Asian continent.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
"The northern continent of the Western Hemisphere, extending northward from the Colombia-Panama border and including Central America, Mexico, the islands of the Caribbean Sea, the United States, Canada, the Arctic Archipelago, and Greenland."
Always striving to correct errors of basic geography....
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Of course, it should be noted that these are marketing people voting. "Coca-cola" is still the 2nd most recognized word worldwide, after "okay", and it certainly belongs above #7 worldwide.
On the other hand, their brand saturation is so complete that they almost don't need to advertise anymore. I'd imagine marketing people prefer things that actually need some marketing to sell, as opposed to Coke, whose commercials serve no purpose anymore except to annoy people at movie theaters (does anyone ever see those commercials and think "oh, maybe that Coke stuff is good, I should try it sometime..."?)
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
I'm a bit surprised Sony didn't make it to the list.
Miles from Ordinary...
... people use words that sound like the one they actually meant, proving they don't really know what they're saying.
On our screens, [Google's] minimalist design betrays its maximal capacity.
No, it belies its maximal capacity. That means it hides it, which is clearly the intent of the sentence; meanwhile, to say it betrays it means the opposite.
Thinkin' Lincoln - a web comic of presidential proportions
Who the fuck is BrandChannel, anyway?
3.5 million of 7 billion is not half of one percent, it's five hundredths of one percent, or 0.05%. One half of one percent of 7 billion would be 35 million people.
Though I do agree that the 1% figure is pretty much wrong.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
Looks like this was a survey of readers (I am assuming marketing type folks) as to their favorite brands, not which brands are most recognizable to people.
Coca-Cola is by far the most recognizable brand in the world. You can go to rural areas in 3rd world countries and ask for a "coca-cola" or even a "coke" and they will know what you are talking about. Ask if they have an "apple" and they will most likely think of the fruit.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
probably due a bad data sampling...
the 5 top brands in latin america are virtually unknown in brazil...
the largest population (both in absolute size and internet users) in latin america is brazilian.
anyway, since the site the made the poll is also unknown here, I'm not surprised...
Apple reported a net profit of US$ 295 million in the last quarter of 2004 alone
....but you know Bill Gates is thinking "ahh thats cute, I make that in three weeks."
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
At least according to the report in question.
Kevin Fox
What does this say about the state of the world where the most recognisable brands in America are sell information access (Google and Apple), Europe gets stylish furniture, and Latin America gets... cement? How do they make cement sexy?
I doubt that Mexicans are more likely to know Pixar. Their sloppy results left them off of "North America", and Mexico's population is much greater than that of Canada.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Is slashdot just an advertising board for Apple & Google? Why is this news? This *survey* hardly came from a random, independent sample! It seems to me that because Apple was shown in some positive light, the article became *slashdot-worthy*. I think not.
I find that most often I end up learning from necessity, rather than for enjoyment.
...for companies that started out housing their primary product in wood cases and legos, respectively.
--AC
Google tops North America, but Apple tops North America?
I'm hoping it was just your writing, and no, I haven't RTFA. I will, and I'm sure doing so will sort things out, but please, let's have *some* modicum of editing.
Well, no wonder that Al-Jazeera is not present in North America list. Not only media, but the corporate big-wigs too are biased. They only see yello (or green, for that matter).
Nothing unusual, but isn't the US of A harming itself by living in its own media shell? If this continues for a while (say 10 yrs?), and if one day somebody peeps 'out', he/she may realize that the whole world has moved ahead (or to some other planet, may be), while they have been living in something like The matrix.
BTW, is this true for Canada too, or its just because they are lumped together with USA?
This article is nothing but FLAIMBAIT for slashdot readers!! Too bad the article itself cannot be modded down or away. 0.02 percent if there were 100 million internet users is insignificant for selecting anything worldwide. Whoever even heard of that website!! Instead of commenting, slashdot users should just just tell the products they think should have been there. I'll bet that we can generate more comments/votes in an hour than the total poll used for it's selection. (Note that the 100 million is a number, not a guess at the number of internet users worldwide.)
You can see the top 10 list for 2004 here.
1. Coke
2. Microsoft
3. IBM
4. GE
5. Intel
This popularity contest at brandchannel.com really seems to be ranking cult brands.
SCO is in odd company for Top Company Queries
1. sco
2. johnson & johnson
3. ing
4. ge aircraft engines
5. fleet
I mean, come on, how many people even know what product "ing" sells? Were the "fleet" queries looking for a loan or did they need a laxative? Somehow I just can't imagine a whole bunch of people doing queries for "ge aircraft engines".
Sign of the times I guess... Or the article is BS...
Visit London Scalextric Club
This is the funniest thing I've read on Slashdot yet ... I must be new here! :D Somebody with points, mod this guy up!
Well, why not Apple and Microsoft. Then it'll truely be a sick monopoly.
Get your facts straight.
There are roughly 6 billion people on earth. 1% of that is "only" 60 Million.
You are way off. According to this site (http://www.internetworldstats.com/top25.htm) it is more like 12.7% of the WHOLE population.
Your point isn't void, but at least use some reasonable figures.
Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity
Balderdash!
I think ten years ago plenty of people knew Mercedes-Benz, Saab, BMW, Country Crock, Lipton, Knorr, Dove, Guiness, Michelin, Gucci, Chanel, Doc Marten's, Nestle, Ferrari, Absolut, BP, British Airways, Lufthansa, Ikea, Evian, Cadbury, Adidas, Lacoste, Perrier, Peugeot, Bennetton (what happened to them?), and of course, "conutry" brands, like German Engineering, French Food & Wine, and British Humour*.
It would be literally exhausting to name all the European brands here. I think there's been some inroads from retailers like H&M which did not have too big of an American presence here, but overall, the net has not had a "net effect"** on anything. Not in favor of any specific country at least.
* We all know the joke don't we? Heaven is German engineering, French food, and British humor. Hell is British food, German humor, and French engineering.
** Bad pun!
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
With accounting snafubars and corporate greed in other news, it's satisfying to see such 'Karma-positive' companies be so well-recognized.
Test signature: Brett Walker
Many people seem to think this thing is a recognizability or popularity award. I guess the need to RTFA is alive and swinging.
If you look at the home page, it notes this is a reader survey to determine the brands with the most IMPACT.
Apple and Google are high on this list because what they do affects what a lot of other people do.
IBM and Coke are not because while they are of course more widley known, bit as much is changin because of them. They are solid companies but evoke change by degrees, not in broad swaths.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Apple and Google's done some good things, but did they help me graduate? Can they work without the conjunction with Starbucks? Will the world come to an end without Apple or Google?
sorry for the bad handwriting
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.11/brands.ht ml
Canada could have had French culture, American know-how, and English government. Instead it got French government, English know-how, and American culture.
And it chaps my ass every day.
I'm having a hard time formulating a google query, as I have no frame of reference with which to include limiting or contextual ideas.
I've been travelling throughout Asia and India over the last 8 months - and *all* the local population in internet cafes use Yahoo. Google is unheard of until I introduce it to them. Coke signs are, of course, EVERYWHERE (even places you wouldn't think have paint and brushes to paint the damn things).
It's the year of Linux! To celebrate I have x free hotmail accounts to give away
OpenGL is very much alive in the 3d market outside games.
And inside the gaming market, John Carmack singlehandedly keeps it current with id software's game engines.
Apple popularity has nothing to do with "OpenGL still alive as competitor of DirectX". The Q3 engine (and the doom3 engine as soon as it starts licensing) has.
They are a niche player. In the USA, they accounted for 3% of the systems sold in the PC market. Worldwide, they accounted for 1.8%.
Microsoft, on the other hand, has about 95% of the market.
Don't flame me, I'm just putting things in perspective.
What is intriguing is what this statistical data shows us:
Of Latin America's top 5 votes, three are alcohol related, one sells bread and the other urban development.
The European's top 5 votes are cheap furniture, cheap air fares, cheap (albeit good) clothes, cheap phones, and Al Jazeera.
The North Americans top 5 votes involve overpriced computers, overpriced tech company stock, an overpriced wal-mart, overpriced coffee, and an overhyped animation company.
In regionwise ratings, Google tops North America...
Actually, the article says Apple tops both North America AND the world. Google comes in second in North America.
The continents as mainlands have been "set in stone" as concepts for decades. Or longer. The only vagueness is when you get to islands (the East Indies, the West Indies, etc). Asia and Europe vs Eurasia is fairly cut-and-dried too, but many do forget that western Russia makes up a good chunk of Europe.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
It's about time someone mentioned Apple and Al Jazeera in the same breath!
But oddly this has changed since jobs came back.
Amazing what an ego centric and artistic CEO can do to a company.
Apple would have been ranked really low back in the late 90's.
http://saveie6.com/
"greatest impact" Do they mean the first-order derivative of recognition or something? Or just their opinion.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
That's weird, considering that there is not 1 IKEA store in the whole of Africa.
If I had created the world I wouldn't have messed about with butterflies and daffodils. I would have started with lasers
dura veritas, sed veritas
(and sometimes funny)
enough said...
-1% milk, half gallon
-soup base, one pkg.
-onions, 1 lb.
-potatoes, five lb. bag
-sausage, 1 lb.
-eggs, one dozen
-pure, unspeakable evil, 1 pkg.
MOD PARENT UP
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
I could have sworn the brand was "Kentucky Fried Chicken" and not "Colonel Sanders Chicken". Weird.
Why is it that the "global" rankings are nearly identical to those of North America. It's clear that the sampling is fubar.
I clicked on the Asia-Pacific link ...
...
And saw that the number 10 company was Nude Drinks
Can anyone shed some light on this?
Thanks,
--The Dude
Errr I think you'll find that Microsoft own a significant percentage of shares in Apple.
The only real alternative to M$ is Linux...
This is because the cultural heart of old Russia and the Russian ethnic group is located in the area around Moscow. That is in Europe.
"Egypt is similar, and is simultaneously in Asia as well as Africa"
Turkey is in a similar situation. A chunk of it is in Europe proper, but the rest is in Asia.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Well, at least most people avoid naming their companies after their private appendage like Bill Gates did.
Apple© Slashvertisment(TM)!
You might think it, but you'd be wrong.
Ironically, doing a Google, it sure looks like "hotpoint" may be a GE spinoff or alternative branding. They take the same exact parts on lots of stuff. But let's leave that alone.
The value of GE's brand in the sense you're talking about is that they make generic, crappy stuff with a brand name on it that people recognize. To cite this as a huge brand advantage seems odd, given that next to any other recognizable brand name GE would, if anything, be at a disadvantage for most products. Go to that hardware store shelf again. There's a GE (thing) and a 3M (thing). The 3M thing is 40 cents more. I'd choose the 3M product every day of the danged week. GE's in a lot of product categories, but the only advantage it would have in any of them would be against something we didn't recognize. That would be the lowest brand on the totem pole, not the best one. Its advantage is that it's pricing stuff very low across a lot of markets while keeping some recognition. I "get" how the business folks think that's something to cheer about, but c'mon.
A fairer question to ask in assessing the brand's true value would be: If you had two roughly equivalent dishwashers or clothes dryers or fridges next to each other, would you be inclined to take the GE over the Maytag, Whirlpool, or Kenmore models? Would you ever buy a GE phone over an AT&T or Southwestern Bell phone at roughly the same price point? Would you buy a GE television over anything else other than (fill in "store brand" name) based on names?
The answer is basically "no." I can't think of a single product category in which that'd be true. GE has brand recognition, all right. I recognize them as a maker of essentially generic products. People know "Chevrolet" cars too. Most people would buy a Chevy Malibu over a Hyundai Excel. Hoo-ray. Chevy sure has a big brand advantage.
On the other hand, would I choose an Apple music device over Dell's or Hewlett Packard's? Even at a price premium? Well, around 70% of the market for players has now made that choice. Sounds like a real, substantial brand advantage to me, at least in that market niche.
Also, keep in mind, until the first iMac Apple essentially did no advertising other than that 1984 ad, and still had tremendously high brand recognition in its market. Pretty unreal.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Is there really nothing else to report on other than what the "top brands" are? There must be something else happening. Maybe wars? Famines? Elections? You know, thing that are actually news.
They should tell you that, of the people that visited brandchannel.com and filled out the survey, this is what we found.
Al-Jazeera is #5? Balloney. There are a lot more brand names FAR more popular than Al-Jazeera. MTV, Levi's, Coke, McDonald's, I could go on. Al-Jazeera?
Frankly, I've never heard of brandchannel before today. Who picked these clods as "experts"?
The cover story on Salon.com today is titled Halleluja, The Mac is Back! It's a fairly interesting article, though not very technical. It talks about the resurgence of the Apple brand name, hypothesizes whether Apple can do any damage at all to Microsoft this time around with the Mini Mac (apparently people are viewing it as an appliance rather than PC replacement, which it turns out may be a good thing, strategically).
could people use the word in the context it's meant to be used, please?
i know that must sound like a flame. it's not meant to be. i'm equally annoyed when germans misuse english. just try and be sure you know what you're saying, please.
Eh, I guess it's an easy continent.
Really, though, what's Bimbo... besides a GREAT brand name I mean.
--
RumorsDaily
Well, you have Longhorn struggling to come out with features Apple already has or is going to have soon.
This degree of copying shows signs of Apple's impact on the market, where to some extent the drive Microsofts behavior.
Then you have MP3 players. Every MP3 player that comes out now is measured against the gold standard - the iPod. You'd have to agree Apple's impact in the digital market is huge right now.
Now consider video codecs. Which do you think is going to be more popular, Microsofts WMV format which few people want to use for fear of domination by Microsoft, or the open H.263 that Apple is pushing and both Blu-Ray and HDDVD support? Again Apple has helped drive that.
Basically, Imapct is an independant measurement of Marketshare, which is what you are talking about. I do think the impact award was primarily for Apple's impact in the digital music market specifically rather than computing, where Apple's impact is a little more subtle.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
amongst geeks maybe, but once you get away from highly developed first world countries, my experience is people are more likely to know their favourite (or the tourists' favourite) brand of soft drink than their prefered computer animation company. Places like rural Cambodia, Mali, islands off Thailand, for example...
You misused "Zeitgeist", you fucking techno-wienie.
So why is anybody surprised that their label is so familiar?
This makes no sense used in this context. The literal translation is "Timeghost", the correct translation would the "spirit of the times".
The sad irony is that you complained about this, but didn't notice that the last two names on the list were made up.
Anyway, there is a lot of space for collaboration, and little downside for either company. Sony is big enough to make Apple look more legitemate, and Apple is cool enough to keep Sony looking relevant, especially in the US.
"Antoine Bugleboy?" next, you'll be telling us that LEVI'S are named after a person!
if i'm a grammar nazi, you're an illiteracy nazi.
" Stephen King comes to mind as a human brand. I'm sure he could publish his grocery list and it would sell:"
When does the movie come out, and who is staring in it? Do you have a link to the trailer yet?
Sure enough, the cow costume was hanging up next to the superhero outfit and sailors uniform. (S,Spud)
OK, is this is rapidly evolving into a propaganda warfare by Mac fanbois. This is NOT the worldwide top brand list. The linked article is actually is based on an online poll of the readers of a certain magazine. It ends there.
6.DISNEYB ORO
The REAL leading brands in 2004 was:
1.COCA-COLA
2.MICROSOFT
3.IBM
4.GE
5.INTEL
7.McDONALDS
8.NOKIA
9.TOYOTA
10.MARL
Apple is #43 in the list. See for yourself: http://www.interbrand.com/best_brands_2004.asp. You can see the brand value in US$. An online poll is worthless in determining the brand values.
I just heard some sad news on talk radio...
.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer
The company was struggling financially when on August 6, 1997 Microsoft bought a $150 million non-voting share of company as a result of a court settlement between themselves and Apple. (Microsoft has since sold all Apple stock holdings.)
Agreed, I wasn't aware that Apple had sold their stock.